Benchmarking Language Models for Statistical Problem Formulation

Abstract

arXiv:2609.01982v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Large language models (LLMs) are increasingly used as assistants for statistical and data science work, yet existing evaluations largely assume the analysis target is already specified. In practice, users arrive with informal goals and heterogeneous data, leaving the model to decide what statistical task is implied and which data are relevant. We first formalize this upstream step as Statistical Problem Formulation and decompose it into two subtask