Of all the stressors you’ve got right now, accessing your statistical software from home shouldn’t be one of them. (You know, the one on your office computer).
We’ve gotten some updates from some statistical software companies on how they’re making it easier to access the software you have a license to or to extend a free trial while you’re working from home.
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One of the many decisions you have to make when model building is which form each predictor variable should take. One specific version of this decision is whether to combine categories of a categorical predictor.
The greater the number of parameter estimates in a model the greater the number of observations that are needed to keep power constant. The parameter estimates in a linear (more…)
Good graphs are extremely powerful tools for communicating quantitative information clearly and accurately.
Unfortunately, many of the graphs we see today confuse, mislead, or deceive the reader.
These poor graphs result from two key limitations. One is a graph designer who isn’t familiar with the principles of effective graphs. The other is software with a poor choice of default settings.
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The following statement might surprise you, but it’s true.
To run a linear model, you don’t need an outcome variable Y that’s normally distributed. Instead, you need a dependent variable that is:
- Continuous
- Unbounded
- Measured on an interval or ratio scale
The normality assumption is about the errors in the model, which have the same distribution as Y|X. It’s absolutely possible to have a skewed distribution of Y and a normal distribution of errors because of the effect of X. (more…)
You probably learned about the four levels of measurement in your very first statistics class: nominal, ordinal, interval, and ratio.
Knowing the level of measurement of a variable is crucial when working out how to analyze the variable. Failing to correctly match the statistical method to a variable’s level of measurement leads either to nonsense or to misleading results.
But the simple framework of the four levels is too simplistic in most real-world data analysis situations.
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by Christos Giannoulis, PhD
Attributes are often measured using multiple variables with different upper and lower limits. For example, we may have five measures of political orientation, each with a different range of values.
Each variable is measured in a different way. The measures have a different number of categories and the low and high scores on each measure are different.
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