Statistical Inference in Ifa Divination: A Dummy Variable Approach

A strong concept in the development and growth of a nation is culture, which is not static but changes. It creates some form of abstract thinking. Ifa divination is an abstract scheme found amongst the Yoruba people. This paper examines the reasoning of Ifa divination as related to random mechanism of its process from statistical point of view. This in terms of chance set-up, notion of combinational analysis, sequential decision procedure which are all statistical terminologies. Divination and gambling are found to be the bedrock of statistics. Ifa divination and statistics have striking similarities because the generic forms of Ifa were reduced to a dummy (0-1) variable, a concept in statistics. Using the tractable G-inverse vis-à-vis the ANOVA, in the analysis of Ifa literary corpus to conclude that each APOLA IFA is highly significant. A major implication of this finding is that the model designed on the Ifa corpus is adequate and could give a reliable forecast predictions as some of the generic names tend to give an unbiased estimates of the model generated, most especially OGBE.