Yesterday, I mentioned this problem For 17 girls diagnosed with anorexia, weight change after family therapy was as follows: 11,11, 6, 9, 14, -3, 0, 7, 22, -5 , -4, 13, 13, 9, 4 , 6, 11 Partial results are shown below. Fill in the missing results: And we had gotten the table completed as…
I was grading the quizzes from my Advanced Quantitative Data Analysis class. This is a class of really smart people in a doctoral program at a selective university. And yet, some of them still had problems with the quiz. Therefore, in however many parts I feel like doing, I am going to discuss how to…
Let’s say that all you knew about probability were some basic rules. Would it be enough to convince you that gambling is a bad bet? I think so. Let’s begin with these four: Probability of something not happening = 1 – the probability of that something happening P(Not X) = 1 – P(X) Since the…
I am at the Western Users of SAS Software conference this week and just like the Joint Statistical Meetings, SAS Global Forum and SPSS Directions, there is about as much diversity here as at the Republican National Convention. I brought this up here and at two other meetings I attended. Each time at least some…
Propensity score matching has had a huge rise in popularity over the past few years. That isn’t a terrible thing, but in my not so humble opinion, many people are jumping on the bandwagon without thinking through if this is what they really need to do. The idea is quite simple – you have two…
As statisticians, we like to say that statistics is everywhere. Here is an example. Regular readers of this blog might know that my darling daughter number three is the world champion in mixed martial arts. There is a very wide gap in the general discourse at mixed martial arts events and, say, the Joint Statistical…
I hate Buffy the Vampire Slayer and the entire Twilight Series. This came about over the course of a week when my daughter had strep throat and was watching approximately 4,789,362 episodes of vampire shows in the living room, which is just down the hall from my office. Thus, when Brenda Osuna from USC asked…
Kirk Anderson recently mentioned a new course on the American Statistical Association Statistical Education group, Statistics in the Media “The focus will be on how statistics are reported in the media. Students will be asked to read news stories and critically evaluate the conclusions made, recognizing when assertions are and are not supported by evidence….
Several interesting random thoughts from JSM: From a session by Freeda Cooner entitled, “Bayesian statistics are powerful, not magical” ways in which Bayes results could be slanted (one hopes unwittingly) were discussed. One point worth repeating is that the validity assumes accurate priors. Kind of obvious, no? Yet, the question is, where did you get…
More than once, I have said that I would never hire someone right out of graduate school. My reason is that graduate students come expecting perfect data sets to analyze, with no data entry errors, normal distributions of all variables, no missing data – and a liberal sprinkling of fairy dust to make it all…