I think descriptive statistics are under-rated. One reason I like Leon Gordis’ Epidemiology book is that he agrees with me. He says that sometimes statistics pass the “inter-ocular test”. That is, they hit you right between the eyes. I’m a big fan of eye-balling statistics and SAS/GRAPH is good for that. Let’s take this example….
I read a lot. This year, I finished 308 books on my Kindle app, another dozen on iBooks, a half-dozen on ebrary and 15 or 20 around the house. I don’t read books on paper very often any more. It’s not too practical for me. I go through them at the rate of about a book…
(There may even be a part two, if I get around to it.) Let me ask you a couple of questions: 1. Do you have more than just one dependent variable and one independent variable? 2. If you said, yes, do you have a CATEGORICAL or ORDINAL dependent variable? If so, use logistic regression. I…
What if you wanted to turn your PROC MIXED into a repeated measures ANOVA using PROC GLM. Why would you want to do this? Well, I don’t know why you would want to do it but I wanted to do it because I wanted to demonstrate for my class that both give you the same…
Any time you learn anything new it can be intimidating. That is true of programming as well as anything else. It may be even more true of using statistical software because you combine the uneasiness many people have about learning statistics with learning a new language. To a statistician, this error message makes perfect sense:…
Computing confidence intervals is one of the areas where beginning statistics students have the most trouble. It is not as difficult if you break it down into steps, and if you use SAS or other statistical software. Here are the steps: 1. Compute the statistic of interest– that is mean, proportion, difference between means 2….
A recent tweet about mixed martial arts decisions set me to thinking about probability. @Fight_ghost tweeted that a TV commentator made no sense when she said that she thought a fighter should have won by split, not unanimous decision. Others on twitter agreed with him that was a stupid comment, and asked did she think…
Last year, I went from teaching in classrooms in a pretty building with a library on the ground floor to teaching on-line. I also went from the semester system to teaching the same content in four weeks. This has led curious friends of mine, used to teaching in the traditional format, to ask , How…
Am I missing something here? All of the macros I have seen for the parallel analysis criterion for factor analysis look pretty complicated, but, unless I am missing something, it is a simple deal. The presumption is this: There isn’t a number like a t-value or F-value to use to test if an eigenvalue is…
I’m about to tear my hair out. I’ve been reading this statistics textbook which shall remain nameless, ostensibly a book for graduate students in computer science, engineering and similar subjects. The presumption is that at the end of the course students will be able to compute and interpret a factor analysis, MANOVA and other multivariate…