Independence in statistics
A while back we introduced the central limit theorem, it was a way to take data and make it normal (gaussian) as if by magic, which is one of the assumptions needed for parametric statistics (the most commonly used kind). Today we’re introducing another assumption, that the data are independent. The idea of independent events is probably straightforward, but it’s yet another bedrock of statistics that we should talk about in depth to help us understand why things are the way they are.
(more…)Day 25: The p-value
It’s true!
Now it seems like we are getting somewhere. Last post we covered z-score and you can read that if you haven’t already, it might be good to familiarize yourself with it since today we are going to talk p-value and the difference between z-score and p-value. That said, let’s dive in and look at the value in the p-value.*
Day 24: The z-score
So if you recall from last post… well I’m not linking to it. It was hellishly personal and frankly I’m still attempting to recover from it. We’re going to take it light this time and we can do a deep dive into something in another post. For that reason, let’s talk about z-score and what exactly it is, I mean we used it in this post and never defined it formally, so let’s do that. Let’s talk z-score!*
Day 22: Parametric vs. NonParametric Statistics
Technically we could call this parametric statistics part 2. However, since we are covering nonparametric statistics and more importantly the difference between parametric and nonparametric statistics, it would seem that this title makes more sense. As usual with a continuation, you probably want to start at the beginning where we define parametric statistics. Ready to get started?*
Day 21: Defining Parametric Statistics
It’s halloween time, we are talking about normally distributed data, so this fits, and I don’t want to hear otherwise!
Well my lovely readers, we’ve made it to the three week mark, 5.7% of the way through! Okay maybe that doesn’t seem like a big deal written like that, but hey it’s progress. So last post we had our independence day, or rather defined what it meant to have independent events vs. dependent events. We also said it was an important assumption in parametric statistics that our events are independent, but then we realized we never defined what parametric statistics even is, oops. So let’s stop dragging our feet and talk parametric statistics!*
Day 20: Independent Events
By: xkcd
Because we introduced the central limit theorem last post, it’s time to introduce another important concept. The idea of independent events, while this may seem intuitive, it is one of the assumptions we make in parametric statistics, another concept we will define, but for now let’s jump into independence.*
Lunatic Laboratories 