regression-to-the-mean

regression-to-the-mean is a skill for Claude Code, Codex from deciqAI/knowledge-skills. It costs 117 tokens per session (1,906 once invoked), scanned A, original, MIT.

A statistical pattern where an unusually high or low result is often followed by a result closer to average, because random influences usually do not repeat.

In plain words
What is it for?
Use it to judge whether an intervention really improved a struggling team or changed an unusually strong performer’s results. It also helps separate lasting effects from normal performance fluctuation.
Why use it?
It helps prevent you from crediting or blaming an intervention for a change that may have happened naturally. This matters when comparing performance before and after coaching, punishment, bonuses, or other actions without a control group.

Skill for Claude CodeCodex

Written for no agent in particular: nothing here depends on one.

Good fit Use it to judge whether an intervention really improved a struggling team or changed an unusually strong performer’s results. It also helps separate lasting effects from normal performance fluctuation.

Compare 6 skills from other repositories ↓
Install with agentmods
npx agentmods add skills/deciqai/knowledge-skills/regression-to-the-mean
Install

Getting it into your agent

One page per mod, every tool's command on it. A separate URL per tool would split the same page into five that compete with each other.

Any agent
npx skills add deciqAI/knowledge-skills --skill regression-to-the-mean
Clone the repo
git clone --depth 1 https://github.com/deciqAI/knowledge-skills

Made for: Claude Code, Codex.

Wrote this? Show the measurements

A badge with what this costs and how it scanned, read live from this page, so it follows the numbers instead of freezing them. Markdown for a README, HTML for a documentation site or a project page.

agentmods badge for regression-to-the-mean

README.md
[![agentmods](https://agentmods.dev/badge/skills/deciqai/knowledge-skills/regression-to-the-mean/github.svg)](https://agentmods.dev/skills/deciqai/knowledge-skills/regression-to-the-mean)
Your own site
<a href="https://agentmods.dev/skills/deciqai/knowledge-skills/regression-to-the-mean"><img src="https://agentmods.dev/badge/skills/deciqai/knowledge-skills/regression-to-the-mean/github.svg" alt="Measured on agentmods" height="20"></a>

Or the 80×15 button, for a site that already has a row of RSS and ATOM ones. Only the verdict fits; the numbers stay here.

agentmods 80×15 button for regression-to-the-mean

Your own site · 80×15
<a href="https://agentmods.dev/skills/deciqai/knowledge-skills/regression-to-the-mean"><img src="https://agentmods.dev/badge/skills/deciqai/knowledge-skills/regression-to-the-mean.svg" alt="Reviewed on agentmods" width="80" height="20"></a>
Per session 117 Skills are progressive disclosure: only the name and description are preloaded; the body loads when the skill is used.
When invoked 1,906 The whole file, excluding the scripts and references it only reads on demand.
Security scan A 0 findings. A grade says what 26 rules found in the file — not that it is safe. Third-party audits
  • NVIDIA SkillSpector pass 7 Sept 2026
How audits are shown
Origin original No closer match found in the catalogue.
Token cost

What it costs to keep this loaded

Counted locally with the o200k_base tokenizer, which is exact for GPT models; Claude uses its own tokenizer and its counts differ. Treat this as one consistent yardstick across the catalogue rather than a bill. Prices are per million input tokens.

ModelPer sessionOnce invoked
Fable 5.1 $0.00117 $0.01906
Opus 5 $0.00059 $0.00953
Sonnet 5 $0.00023 $0.00381
Haiku 4.5 $0.00012 $0.00191

Measured 9d ago against content hash 39336e72de20, method: parsed. Prices are Anthropic first-party input rates as of 2026-09-12, from the pricing page.

Security

Grade A, and why

regression-to-the-mean scanned grade A with 0 findings against 26 rules in 11 categories — prompt injection, anti-refusal, data exfiltration, privilege escalation, supply chain, agent snooping, system-prompt leakage, SSRF and excessive agency — measured 9d ago.

A static scan of the body, not an audit. Every finding is printed with the line that produced it so you can judge whether it matters here. A mod is markdown that instructs an agent; that is exactly why what it instructs is worth reading.

Nothing flagged

None of the 26 patterns this scan looks for appear in this file: no shell pipes, no recursive deletes, no credential paths, no hidden text, no instruction-override or anti-refusal phrasing, no agent-config snooping. That is not a guarantee, it is the absence of the things that are checkable.

regression-to-the-mean/SKILL.md · 125 lines

How it starts

The opening of the file, as written. The whole thing — 125 lines — stays where its author put it; the contents beside it link to each section on GitHub.

Regression to the Mean

Overview

Regression to the mean is the statistical regularity that any noisy measurement producing an extreme value tends to be followed on retest by a less-extreme value — because the extreme portion was partly driven by non-repeating random noise. There is no "force pulling back to average"; it is a mathematical consequence of signal + noise structure.

Named by Francis Galton (1886) studying parent-child height: tall parents have tall children, but slightly shorter; short parents have short children, but slightly taller. Kahneman's Israeli Air Force example (2011, Ch. 17) is the most-cited operational case — flight instructors concluded punishment works and praise doesn't, but were observing regression, not causation.

Composes with survivorship-bias (extreme survivors regress), probabilistic-thinking (regression is probabilistic), narrative-fallacy (regression drives post-hoc narratives), fundamental-attribution-error (attributing regression to character/intervention is FAE).

When to Use

  • Evaluating the effect of an intervention on extreme performers (struggling teams, top sales reps, low-rated branches)
  • Designing or interpreting A/B tests or pilot programs
  • Reviewing year-over-year performance changes
  • Hiring or promoting top performers
  • Evaluating investment fund performance
  • Analyzing acquisition outcomes
  • Building or critiquing causal claims about training, coaching, or feedback
  • Judging whether an AI startup's viral quarter, a fund's AI hot streak, or a model's benchmark spike is a durable trend or an outlier reverting toward average (AI hype extrapolation)
  • Someone says "regression to the mean," "things will average out," "they always come back"

Not when: the measurement is noise-free (rare in business); the underlying signal is genuinely changing (e.g., the business model fundamentally improved); the intervention is so substantial that no plausible regression can explain the effect.

Read the full file on GitHub · 125 lines

Files

What ships with it

3 files beside SKILL.md in the same directory: the scripts, references and assets a skill reads on demand. Not counted in the per-session cost; read them before you install if any of them is executable.

Changes

What this file has done since we first saw it

Hashed on every crawl. A supply-chain change to an agent config is a question of when, not whether, so the history is kept rather than the latest state alone.

  1. 9d ago First seen · 125 lines · 117 tokens per session scan A 39336e72de20

Subscribe to this mod's changes

regression-to-the-mean is a skill published in the GitHub repository deciqAI/knowledge-skills (10 stars, last pushed 11d ago), licensed MIT. It adds 117 tokens to every session and 1,906 once invoked, about $0.0006 per session on Opus 5. A static security scan graded it A with 0 findings. No closer match exists in the catalogue, so it is treated as the original; first seen 2026-09-03.

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