The government is extremely fond of amassing great quantities of statistics. These are raised to the nth degree, the cube roots are extracted, and the results are arranged into elaborate and impressive displays. What must be kept ever in mind, however, is that in every case, the figures are first put down by a village…
Where we left off, I had created some parcels and was going to do a factor analysis later. Now, it’s later. If you’ll recall, I had not find any items that correlated significantly with the food item that also made sense conceptually. For example, it correlated highly with attending church services but that didn’t really…
First of all, what are parcels? Not the little packages your grandma left on the table in the hall when she came back from shopping. Well, not only that. In factor analysis, parcels are simply the sum of a small number of items. I prefer using parcels when possible because both basic psychometric theory and…
Someone handed me a data set on acculturation that they had collected from a small sample size of 25 people. There was a good reason that the sample was small – think African-American presidents of companies over $100 million in sales or Latina neurosurgeons. Anyway, small sample, can’t reasonably expect to get 500 or 1,000…
At first, I was thinking it wasn’t right to have a favorite paper, but then I realized that was idiotic. It’s not like these papers (or their presenters) are my children. My favorite paper was, Statistical modeling for large complex data: Five new directions from SAS/STAT software If you’re not a statistician, props to you…
The nice thing about going to SAS Global Forum is that it’s the gift that keeps on giving. Long after I have gone home, there are still points to ponder. Visual analytics is big and not just in the sense of there is a product out called that which I have never used but that…
If you did not go to SAS Global Forum this week, here are some things you missed: Me, rambling on about the 13 techniques all biostatisticians should know, including the answer to: If McNemar and Kappa are both statistics for handling correlated, categorical data, how can they give you completely different results? The answer is…
Esteemed statistics guru, Dr. Nathaniel Golden has some sobering news for Democrats. His latest models predict a Republican blow out. As can be seen by the map below, the Republican front-runner has tapped into the mood of resentment in the country’s non-elites. When the dust has settled, only the two highest earning states in the…
I can’t believe I haven’t written about this before – I’m going to tell you an easy (yes, easy) way to find and communicate to a non-technical audience standardized mortality rates and relative risk by strata. It all starts with PROC STDRATE . No, I take that back. It starts with this post I wrote…
SENSITIVITY AND SPECIFICITY – TWO ANSWERS TO “DO YOU HAVE A DISEASE?” Both sensitivity and specificity address the same question – how accurate is a test for disease – but from opposite perspectives. Sensitivity is defined as the proportion of those who have the disease that are correctly identified as positive. Specificity is the proportion…