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Data & Analytics · Intermediate

Survivorship Bias

Drawing conclusions only from entities that 'survived' a selection process while ignoring those that failed or dropped out.

Definition

Studying only successful companies or still-active customers overstates success factors and retention.

Example

Analyzing only funds that still exist overstates average fund performance.

Exam tip

If failed or churned cases are missing from the data, suspect survivorship bias.

Related terms