80/20 Rule of Statistical Methods Development

Developing statistical methods is hard and often frustrating work. One of the under appreciated rules in statistical methods development is the 80/20 rule. The basic idea is that the first reasonable thing you can do to a set of data often is 80% of the way to the optimal solution. Everything after that is working on getting the last 20%. The hard decision is whether to create a new method is whether the 20% is worth it. This is obviously application specific. Here is an interesting discussion about 80/20 rule of statistical methods development.

http://simplystatistics.org/2014/03/20/the-8020-rule-of-statistical-methods-development/