Tag: nursing

SecretSource: of Minitab and Dataviz

When the goers go and the stayers stay, when shirts loosen and tattoos glisten, it’s time for the statisticians and the miners and the data scientists to talk, and walk, Big Iron.

R. S-Plus. SAS. Tableau. Stata. GnuPlot. Mondrian. DataDesk. Minitab.   MINITAB?????? Okay, we’ll leave the others to get back to their arm wrasslin’, but if you want to produce high quality graphs, simply, readily and quickly, then Minitab could be for you.

A commercialized version of Omnitab, Minitab appeared in Philadelphia in 1972 and has long been associated with students learning stats, but also now with business, industrial and medical/health quality management and six sigma, etc. There’s some  other real ‘rough and tumble’ applications involving Minitab – DR Helsell’s ‘Statistics for Censored Environmental Data using Minitab and R’ (Wiley 2012), for instance.

IBM SPSS and Microsoft Excel can produce good graphs (‘good’ in the ‘good sense’ of John Tukey , Edward Tufte, William Cleveland, Howard Wainer, Stephen Few & Nathan Yau etc etc), with the soft pedal down and ‘caution switches’ on, but Minitab is probably going to be easier.

For example, the Statistical Consulting Centre at the University of Melbourne uses Minitab for most of its graphs (R for the trickiest ones). As well as general short courses on Minitab, R, SPSS and GenStat there’s a one day course in Minitab graphics in November, which I’ve done and can recommend.

More details on the Producing Excellent Graphics Simply (PEGS) course using Minitab at Melbourne are at

http://www.scc.ms.unimelb.edu.au/pegs.html

student and academic pricing for Minitab is at http://onthehub.com/

What, I wonder, would Florence Nightingale have used for graphic software if she was alive today???

2014 Books: Medical Illuminations and another Trout in the Milk

The first cab off the rank for 2014 is Howard Wainer’s ‘Medical Illuminations: Using Evidence, Visualization & Statistical Thinking to Improve Healthcare’, Oxford University Press,  2014. It costs around $40 Australian.

Dr Wainer has written several great graphics books, including 2005’s ‘Graphic Discovery: a Trout in the Milk and Other Visual Adventures’, Princeton University Press.

The new book has more of a medical theme, including extremely useful chapters on medical prediction, the importance of showing diabetes patients real-time  and understandable information on their blood sugar levels, and the over-use of pie charts.

Although not mentioned in the above books, Florence Nightingale, Nursing pioneer and first female Fellow of what was to become the Royal Statistical Society, developed and used graphs and charts (admittedly an early form of pie chart). Ms Nightingale used such graphs to clearly show Queen Victoria, who wasn’t a statistician and wouldn’t have appreciated heaps and heaps of tables, the very real problems that soldiers were facing in the Crimean War due to poor sanitation.

Since then, much medical data is routinely collected and statistically analysed, but there is still a long way to go in terms of portraying and illuminating that information to medical staff and the patients and carers themselves.  Books like Medical Illuminations, supplemented by general info on the ‘how’ of graphic presentation using readily available software (Wainer’s texts focus mainly on the ‘who’, ‘what’ and ‘why’), will help to achieve such an important goal.

Recommended, for non-statisticians and statisticians alike!

Oxford University Press website: http://www.oup.com.au/titles/academic/medicine/9780199668793