Nigel Marriott's Blog

An independent statistician using data to understand our world and to predict the future

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Stats Training Materials – Statistical Inference & Hypothesis Testing

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Mention P-values and most people will probably shudder at some memory of an incomprehensible lecture or lesson on statistical tests.  Words like null hypotheses, t-tests, statistical significance might pop into your mind with little understanding of what they are about.  What you may know is that scientists have to report a p-value for any experiment they do or do they?

The area of Statistical Inference is a core area of study for any statistician.  Put simply, Inference means to infer from the observations you’ve made about your data and to draw conclusions about what might be happening in real life.  There are two parts to Inference.

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Stats Training Materials – Forecasting & Risk Modelling

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All organisations want to understand what has happened in the past and what will happen in the future.  The use of statistics and statistical thinking is essential to be a better forecaster but that doesn’t mean it is easy to do!  At the same time, we are bombarded with forecasts in the media and that can make it difficult to decide which forecasts to pay attention to and which can be ignored.

My course “Identifying Trends & Making Forecasts” is all about doing the basics right when it comes to analysing trends and making predictions.  To support this course, this post makes available a variety of material in the public domain covering the following themes:-

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Stats Training Materials – Basic Statistical Concepts

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A sound grasp of basic statistical concepts is essential to have any hope of acquiring the mindset of a statistical thinker and to be able to use statistical methods.  My introductory course “The 6 Concepts of Statistical Thinking” lays the foundations in the following.

  1. Probability – the difference between conditional & absolute probability.
  2. Risk – why it is an extension of probability and the importance of alpha (false positive) and beta (false negative) risk.
  3. Expectation – how to summarise a dataset into one number which measures its location.
  4. Variance – how to measure the spread of a dataset.
  5. Distribution – how to describe the shape of a dataset.
  6. Correlation – how to measure the relationship between two variables and understand the two golden rules of correlation.

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Stats Training Materials – Multivariate Analysis

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If I were to remark to you that “the weather is very nice today” or “I didn’t like that person”, it is unlikely that I would have made such statements based on a single variable.  It is more likely that a combination of variables were evaluated to arrive at these statements.  When we analysis datasets with multiple variables, we are undertaking Multivariate Statistical Analysis.

Multivariate Analysis comes in two flavours :-

  1. Analysis of Correlations between Multiple Variables – Known as R-Analysis – Informally known as reducing the dimensionality of your dataset.
  2. Analysis of Distance between Many Objects – Known as Q-Analysis – Informally known as mapping, clustering or segmentation of your dataset.

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Stats in the News #0 – The Evidence Hierarchy and how to use it

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“Graduates aren’t skilled enough!” says a BBC headline.  What is your immediate reaction?  If you decide to find out more and read the article, you will see the following.

  • A brief reference to a survey of a 174 organisations, half of whom are apparently moaning graduate skills.
  • 3 brief interviews with recent graduates asking what they wish they had learned before starting their job.

After reading this, do you feel that a case has been made that universities are slipping up?  How much weight should you place on this article and the information it contains?  One of the major problems with news these days is that we are bombarded with articles about so many things that it can difficult to sort the good from the bad, especially when articles are referring to data in one way or another.  My Evidence Hierarchy provides a short cut to assess the usefulness of news articles and with a bit of practice, I hope the result will be less stress for you about what is going on in the world.

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