Statistical Software

Non-parametric ANOVA in SPSS

November 1st, 2013 by

I sometimes get asked questions that many people need the answer to.  Here’s one about non-parametric ANOVA in SPSS.

Question:

Is there a non-parametric 3 way ANOVA out there and does SPSS have a way of doing a non-parametric anova sort of thing with one main independent variable and 2 highly influential cofactors?

Quick Answer:

No.

Detailed Answer:

There is a non-parametric one-way ANOVA: Kruskal-Wallis, and it’s available in SPSS under non-parametric tests.  There is even a non-paramteric two-way ANOVA, but it doesn’t include interactions (and for the life of me, I can’t remember its name, but I remember learning it in grad school).

But there is no non-parametric factorial ANOVA, and it’s because of the nature of interactions and most non-parametrics.

What it basically comes down to is that most non-parametric tests are rank-based. In other words, (more…)


R Is Not So Hard! A Tutorial, Part 6: Basic Plotting in R

October 28th, 2013 by

In Part 6, let’s look at basic plotting in R.  Try entering the following three commands together (the semi-colon allows you to place several commands on the same line).

x <- seq(-4, 4, 0.2) ;  y <- 2*x^2 + 4*x - 7
plot(x, y) (more…)


The Joy of Pasting SPSS Syntax

October 14th, 2013 by

Every so often I point out to a client who exclusively uses menus in SPSS that they can (and should) hit the Paste button instead of OK. Many times, the client never realized it was there.

I am here today to tell you that it is there, and it is wonderful.  For a few reasons.

When you use the menus in SPSS, you’re really taking a shortcut.  You’re telling SPSS which syntax commands, along with which options, you want to run.

Clicking OK at the end of a dialog box will run the  menu options you just picked. You may never see the underlying commands that SPSS just ran.

If instead you hit Paste, those command won’t automatically be run, but will instead the code to run those commands will be (more…)


Opposite Results in Ordinal Logistic Regression, Part 2

July 22nd, 2013 by

I received the following email from a reader after sending out the last article: Opposite Results in Ordinal Logistic Regression—Solving a Statistical Mystery.

And I agreed I’d answer it here in case anyone else was confused.

Karen’s explanations always make the bulb light up in my brain, but not this time.

With either output,
The odds of 1 vs > 1 is exp[-2.635] = 0.07 ie unlikely to be  1, much more likely (14.3x) to be >1
The odds of £2 vs > 2 exp[-0.812] =0.44 ie somewhat unlikely to be £2, more likely (2.3x) to be >2

SAS – using the usual regression equation
If NAES increases by 1 these odds become (more…)


Opposite Results in Ordinal Logistic Regression—Solving a Statistical Mystery

July 5th, 2013 by

A number of years ago when I was still working in the consulting office at Cornell, someone came in asking for help interpreting their ordinal logistic regression results.

The client was surprised because all the coefficients were backwards from what they expected, and they wanted to make sure they were interpreting them correctly.

It looked like the researcher had done everything correctly, but the results were definitely bizarre. They were using SPSS and the manual wasn’t clarifying anything for me, so I did the logical thing: I ran it in another software program. I wanted to make sure the problem was with interpretation, and not in some strange default or (more…)


R Is Not So Hard! A Tutorial, Part 5: Fitting an Exponential Model

May 22nd, 2013 by

Stage 2

In Part 3 and Part 4 we used the lm() command to perform least squares regressions. We saw how to check for non-linearity in our data by fitting polynomial models and checking whether they fit the data better than a linear model. Now let’s see how to fit an exponential model in R.

As before, we will use a data set of counts (atomic disintegration events that take place within a radiation source), taken with a Geiger counter at a nuclear plant.

The counts were registered over a 30 second period for a short-lived, man-made radioactive compound. We read in the data and subtract the background count of 623.4 counts per second in order to obtain (more…)