statistical distributions

Strategies for Choosing and Planning a Statistical Analysis

April 22nd, 2025 by

The first real data set I ever analyzed was from my senior honors thesis as an undergraduate psychology major. I had taken both intro stats and an ANOVA class, and I applied all my new skills with gusto, analyzing every which way.

It wasn’t too many years into graduate school that I realized that these data analyses were a bit haphazard. (Okay, a LOT). And honestly, not at all well thought out.

A few decades of data analysis experience later, I realized that’s just a symptom of being an inexperienced data analyst.

But even experienced data analysts can get off track. It’s especially easy with large data sets with many variables. It’s just so tempting to try one thing, then another, and pretty soon you’ve spent weeks getting nowhere. (more…)


Member Training: Making Sense of Statistical Distributions

August 1st, 2017 by

Many who work with statistics are already functionally familiar with the normal distribution, and maybe even the binomial distribution.

These common distributions are helpful in many applications, but what happens when they just don’t work?

This webinar will cover a number of statistical distributions, including the:

  • Poisson and negative binomial distributions (especially useful for count data)
  • Multinomial distribution (for responses with more than two categories)
  • Beta distribution (for continuous percentages)
  • Gamma distribution (for right-skewed continuous data)
  • Bernoulli and binomial distributions (for probabilities and proportions)
  • And more!

We’ll also explore the relationships among statistical distributions, including those you may already use, like the normal, t, chi-squared, and F distributions.


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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