Description
Book SynopsisFeatures basic statistical concepts as a tool for thinking critically, wading through large quantities of information, and answering practical, everyday questions
Written in an engaging and inviting manner, Beyond Basic Statistics: Tips, Tricks, and Techniques Every Data Analyst Should Know presents the more subjective side of statisticsthe art of data analytics. Each chapter explores a different question using fun, common sense examples that illustrate the concepts, methods, and applications of statistical techniques.
Without going into the specifics of theorems, propositions, or formulas, the book effectively demonstrates statistics as a useful problem-solving tool. In addition, the author demonstrates how statistics is a tool for thinking critically, wading through large volumes of information, and answering life's important questions.
Beyond Basic Statistics: Tips, Tricks, and Techniques Every Data Analyst Should Know also features:
Trade Review“This is a consistently entertaining and instructive book. The stories are interspersed with serious background material, and the combination works very well. This would be entirely suitable as supplementary reading for a statistics course or for an independent reading project.” (MAA Reviews, 20 September 2015)
Table of ContentsPreface ix
1 Introduction: It Seemed like the Right Thing to Do at the Time 1
2 The Type A Diet: Sampling Strategies to Eliminate Confounding and Reduce Your Waistline 9
3 Conservatives, Liberals, and Other Political Pawns: How to Gain Power and Influence with Sample Size Calculations 31
4 Bunco, Bricks, and Marked Cards: Chi‐Squared Tests and How to Beat a Cheater 47
5 Why it Pays to be a Stable Master: Sumo Wrestlers and Other Robust Statistics 69
6 Five‐Hour Marriages: Continuous Distributions, Tests for Normality, and Juicy Hollywood Scandals 91
7 Believe It or Don’t: Using Outlier Detection to Find the Weirdest of the Weird 109
8 The Battle of the Movie Monsters, Round Two: Ramping up Hypothesis Tests with Nonparametric Statistics 123
9 Models, Murphy’s Law, and Public Humiliation: Regression Rules to Live By 139
Appendix A Critical Values for the Standard Normal Distribution 163
Appendix B Critical Values for the T-Distribution 165
Appendix C Critical Values for the Chi-Squared Distribution 167
Appendix D Critical Values for Grubbs’ Test 169
Appendix E Critical Values for Wilcoxson Signed Rank Test: Small Sample Sizes 171
Glossary 173
Index 185
