by Christos Giannoulis Many data sets contain well over a thousand variables. Such complexity, the speed of contemporary desktop computers, and the ease of use of statistical analysis packages can encourage ill-directed analysis. It is easy to generate a vast array of poor ‘results’ by throwing everything into your software and waiting to see what […]
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Many of us love performing statistical analyses but hate writing them up in the Results section of the manuscript. We struggle with big-picture issues (What should I include? In what order?) as well as minutia (Do tables have to be double-spaced?).
By Karen Grace-Martin Confounding variable is one of those statistical terms that confuses a lot of people. Not because it represents a confusing concept, but because of how it’s used. (Well, it’s a bit of a confusing concept, but that’s not the worst part). First, it has slightly different meanings to different types of researchers. […]
Latent constructs, such as liberalism or conservatism, are theoretical and cannot be measured directly. But we can use a set of questions on a scale, called indicators, to represent the construct together by combining them into a latent factor.Often prior research has determined which indicators represent the latent construct. Prudent researchers will run a confirmatory factor analysis (CFA) to ensure the same indicators work in their sample.
Predicting future outcomes, the next steps in a process, or the best choice(s) from an array of possibilities are all essential needs in many fields. The predictive model is used as a decision making tool in advertising and marketing, meteorology, economics, insurance, health care, engineering, and would probably be useful in your work too!
When our research question is focused on the frequency of occurrence of an event, we will typically use a count model to analyze the results. There are numerous count models. A few examples are: Poisson, negative binomial, zero-inflated Poisson and truncated negative binomial.There are specific requirements as to which count model to use. The models are not interchangeable. But regardless of the model we use, there is a very important prerequisite that they all share.
There are a number of simplistic methods available for tackling the problem of missing data. Unfortunately there is a very high likelihood that each of these simplistic methods introduces bias into our model results. Multiple imputation is considered to be the superior method of working with missing data. It eliminates the bias introduced by the […]
The concept of “hazard” is similar, but not exactly the same as, its meaning in everyday English. If you’re not familiar with Survival Analysis, it’s a set of statistical methods for modelling the time until an event occurs.Let’s use an example you’re probably familiar with — the time until a PhD candidate completes their dissertation.
One issue with using tests of significance is that black and white cut-off points such as 5 percent or 1 percent may be difficult to justify. Significance tests on their own do not provide much light about the nature or magnitude of any effect to which they apply. One way of shedding more light on […]
Oops—you ran the analysis you planned to run on your data, carefully chosen to answer your research question, but your residuals aren’t normally distributed. Maybe you’ve tried transforming the outcome variable, or playing around with the independent variables, but still no dice. That’s ok, because you can always turn to a non-parametric analysis, right? Well, […]
