In this series of ‘eat your greens‘ posts looking at core statistical concepts in more detail, we have looked closely at what a test of statistical significance actually is. In particular, we have focused on how to interpret the statistical probability value that various tests generate. This value, often labelled ‘P=’, ‘Prob’ or ‘Sig.’ in …
IBM have released a new update to SPSS v27. Interestingly, this is a ‘dot’ release that contains a number of useful functional improvements rather than the usual bug fixes or third-party compatibility enhancements. The new procedures include three additional statistical tests for comparing differences in proportions. These procedures were introduced as syntax only commands in …
Earlier in this series of ‘eat your greens‘ postings I looked at the issue of declaring something to be ‘statistically significant’. The purpose of that post was to highlight the fact that not all statistical results are worthy of being regarded as ‘eureka!’ moments just because the findings are unlikely to have occurred due to …
This is the latest in our ‘eat your greens’ series – a back to basics look at core statistical concepts that are often misunderstood or misapplied. In everyday speech the term ‘correlation’ refers to a mutual connection or relationship between two things. In statistics correlations are specific measures or values that attempt to quantify the …
Spreadsheets have been much in the news over the last couple of days in the UK, and not for good reasons. It looks as though Excel’s limit on the number of rows of data possible in a spreadsheet has led to Public Health England misplacing more than 16,000 Covid test results. The implications of this …
This is the fifth post in our ‘eat your greens’ series – a back to basics look at some of the core concepts of statistics and analytics that, in our experience, are frequently misunderstood or misapplied. In this post we’ll look in more depth at the concept of the standard error and confidence intervals. In …
The gateway to inference – the standard error and confidence intervals Read More »
This is the fourth post in our ‘eat your greens’ series – a back to basics look at some of the core concepts of statistics and analytics that, in our experience, are frequently misunderstood or misapplied. In this post we’ll look in more depth at the concept of the normal distribution. One of the first …
None of us can have failed to notice the recent debacle over Ofqual’s (the Office of Qualifications and Examinations Regulation) use of an algorithm to predict pupil grades. Once again, ‘algorithm fever’ has generated a flurry of news articles questioning whether we are sleepwalking into a dystopian future where human expert decision-making is replaced with …
This is the third post in our ‘eat your greens’ series – a back to basics look at some of the core concepts of statistics and analytics that, in our experience, are frequently misunderstood or misapplied. In this post we’ll look in more depth at the concept of the standard distribution. I’m often struck by …
This is the second post in our ‘eat your greens’ series – a back to basics look at some of the core concepts of statistics and analytics that, in our experience, are frequently misunderstood or misapplied. In this post we’ll look in more depth at the concept of testing versus inferring. One of most daunting …