Simple Stats: Food, Friends, Families and F values

Way back when I was a young data analyst, there were limitations to the techniques available for analysing certain types of data. If the data involved counts, for example, there were certain types of transformation, and for repeated measurements over time, one needed ‘fiddle factors’ such as the G-G and H-F, or ‘scattergun’ mighty MANOVA approaches, that lacked in statistical power what they made up in firepower.

These days, even dear old SPSS has some sophisticated regression models, but whereas once there was a ‘trees not forest’ approach of a whole lot of basic tests, looking for ‘significant’ p values, rather than practical effect sizes and generality, now there’s complex ‘forest’ tests, without understanding the output, or even the question.

When talking about simplicity, analysts often recall the monk William of Occam and his “razor” (‘vain to do with more what can be done with fewer’) or misquote Albert Einstein, who probably never actually said ‘everything should be made as simple as possible, but not simpler’).

I like the ancient Greek, Epicurus of Athens, who was big on simple things like food, and friends and families, (although his name has come to be associated with a sort of false. hoggish hedonism, which defeats the purpose). I reckon we need to get a wooden table, some nice fresh food, jugs of (unfermented & fermented) grape, and after the important things like art and sport and the latest clips on Rage night music discussed, then talk about research questions, how they are to be answered, in what sensible but creative manner, so as to get back to other things.

We’d begin with graphical techniques, with the purpose of saying ‘aha’ or ‘Eureka’;  not ‘gosh’ or ‘wow’ or ‘huh?’. Building up with fundamental methods, then perhaps more complex methods if needed, we’d test our models on fresh samples, and looking at that, and effect sizes, as well as confidence intervals and p values. I reckon that’s the sort of data party that even old Epicurus might have attended! http://textpublishing.com.au/books-and-authors/book/travels-with-epicurus/

http://www.dkstatisticalconsulting.com/practical-statistics/  <great book for analysing counts etc using SPSS & Stata>

Author: Dr Dean McKenzie

I hold a BA(Honours) in Psychology from Deakin University, and much more recently, a PhD in Psychiatric Epidemiology (Classification & Regression Trees) from Monash University (2009) I have many years experience applying classical (e.g. ANOVA), contemporary (e.g. quantile regression) and data mining (e.g. trees, bagging, boosting, random forests) to psychological, medical and health data using Stata, IBM SPSS, Salford CART and open source Weka, as well as in statistical consulting, and advising people of many different levels of stats experience View all posts by Dr Dean McKenzie