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Member Training: Those Darn Ratios!

December 1st, 2018 by

Ratios are everywhere in statistics—coefficient of variation, hazard ratio, odds ratio, the list goes on. You see them reported in the literature and in your output.

You comment on them in your reports. You even (kinda) understand them. Or, maybe, not quite?

Please join Elaine Eisenbeisz as she presents an overview of the how and why of various ratios we use often in statistical practice.

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Member Training: A Primer on Exponents and Logarithms for the Data Analyst

January 2nd, 2018 by

Ah, logarithms. They were frustrating enough back in high school. (If you even got that far in high school math.)

And they haven’t improved with age, now that you can barely remember what you learned in high school.

And yet… they show up so often in data analysis.

If you don’t quite remember what they are and how they work, they can make the statistical methods that use them seem that much more obtuse.

So we’re going to take away that fog of confusion about exponents and logs and how they work. (more…)


Member Training: The Multi-Faceted World of Residuals

July 1st, 2017 by

Most analysts’ primary focus is to check the distributional assumptions with regards to residuals. They must be independent and identically distributed (i.i.d.) with a mean of zero and constant variance.

Residuals can also give us insight into the quality of our models.

In this webinar, we’ll review and compare what residuals are in linear regression, ANOVA, and generalized linear models. Jeff will cover:

  • Which residuals — standardized, studentized, Pearson, deviance, etc. — we use and why
  • How to determine if distributional assumptions have been met
  • How to use graphs to discover issues like non-linearity, omitted variables, and heteroskedasticity

Knowing how to piece this information together will improve your statistical modeling skills.


Note: This training is an exclusive benefit to members of the Statistically Speaking Membership Program and part of the Stat’s Amore Trainings Series. Each Stat’s Amore Training is approximately 90 minutes long.

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Member Training: Statistical Rules of Thumb: Essential Practices or Urban Myths?

March 1st, 2017 by

There are many rules of thumb in statistical analysis that make decision making and understanding results much easier.

Have you ever stopped to wonder where these rules came from, let alone if there is any scientific basis for them? Is there logic behind these rules, or is it propagation of urban legends?

In this webinar, we’ll explore and question the origins, justifications, and some of the most common rules of thumb in statistical analysis, like:

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Member Training: (Just About) Everything You Need To Know Before Starting a Survey

February 1st, 2016 by

This webinar, presented by Yasamin Miller, will cover broadly survey design and planning.

It will outline the advantages and disadvantages of the various data collection modes, types of samples available to target your population, how to obtain a representative sample, and how to avoid the pitfalls of bad questionnaire design.


Note: This training is an exclusive benefit to members of the Statistically Speaking Membership Program and part of the Stat’s Amore Trainings Series. Each Stat’s Amore Training is approximately 90 minutes long.

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R is Not So Hard! A Tutorial, Part 22: Creating and Customizing Scatter Plots

December 31st, 2015 by

In our last post, we calculated Pearson and Spearman correlation coefficients in R and got a surprising result.

So let’s investigate the data a little more with a scatter plot.

We use the same version of the data set of tourists. We have data on tourists from different nations, their gender, number of children, and how much they spent on their trip.

Again we copy and paste the following array into R.


M <- structure(list(COUNTRY = structure(c(3L, 3L, 3L, 3L, 1L, 3L, 2L, 3L, 1L, 3L, 3L, 1L, 2L, 2L, 3L, 3L, 3L, 2L, 3L, 1L, 1L, 3L,
1L, 2L), .Label = c("AUS", "JAPAN", "USA"), class = "factor"),GENDER = structure(c(2L, 1L, 2L, 2L, 1L, 2L, 1L, 2L, 1L, 2L, 2L, 1L, 1L, 1L, 1L, 2L, 1L, 1L, 2L, 2L, 1L, 1L, 1L, 2L), .Label = c("F", "M"), class = "factor"), CHILDREN = c(2L, 1L, 3L, 2L, 2L, 3L, 1L, 0L, 1L, 0L, 1L, 2L, 2L, 1L, 1L, 1L, 0L, 2L, 1L, 2L, 4L, 2L, 5L, 1L), SPEND = c(8500L, 23000L, 4000L, 9800L, 2200L, 4800L, 12300L, 8000L, 7100L, 10000L, 7800L, 7100L, 7900L, 7000L, 14200L, 11000L, 7900L, 2300L, 7000L, 8800L, 7500L, 15300L, 8000L, 7900L)), .Names = c("COUNTRY", "GENDER", "CHILDREN", "SPEND"), class = "data.frame", row.names = c(NA, -24L))


M
attach(M)

plot(CHILDREN, SPEND)

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