For those of you who teach, or are interested in seeing an illustrated series of analyses, there is a new compendium of files to help describe how to fit models for the extended case studies in the Second Edition of the Statistical Sleuth: A Course in...
Dynamite plots are a somewhat pejorative term for a graphical display where the height of a bar indicates the mean, and the vertical line on top of it represents the standard deviation (or standard error). These displays are commonly found in many scientific disciplines, as a way of communicating group differences in means.
Many...
While traditional statistics courses teach students to calculate intervals and test for binomial proportions using a normal or t approximation, this method does not always work well. Agresti and Coull ("Approximate is better than "exact' for interval estimation of binomial proportions". The American Statistician, 1998; 52:119-126) demonstrated this and reintroduced an...
We've been more sensitive to accounting for multiple comparisons recently, in part due to work that Nick and colleagues published on the topic. In this entry, we consider results from a randomized trial (Kypri et al., 2009) to reduce problem drinking ...
A recent exchange on the R-sig-teaching list featured a discussion of how best to teach new students R. The initial post included an exercise to write a function, that given a n, will draw n rows of a triangle made up of "*", noting that for a beginner, this may require two for loops. For example,...
R
There are often times when it is useful to create an individual level dataset from aggregated data (such as a table). While this can be done using the expand.table() function within the epitools package, it is also straightforward to do directly within R.
Imagine that instead of the individual level data, we had only the 2x2 table for the...
A colleague teaching college algebra wrote in the R-sig-teaching list asking for assistance in plotting the solutions to the inequality x^2 - 3 > 0. This type of display is handy in providing a graphical solution to accompany an analytic one. RThe plot...
We're continually amazed with new developments within RStudio, the integrated developed environment for R that we highlighted previously (Among others, Andrew Gelman agrees with us about its value). The most recent addition addresses one of our earlie...
Simpson's paradox is always amazing to explain to students. What's bad for one group, and bad for another group is good for everyone, if you just collapse over the grouping variable. Unlike many mathematical paradoxes, this arises in a number of real...
Pairs plots (section 5.1.17) are a useful way of displaying the pairwise relations between variables in a dataset. But the default display is unsatisfactory when the variables aren't all continuous. In this entry, we discuss ways to improve these dis...
Zero Inflated Models and Generalized Linear Mixed Models with R.
Zuur, Saveliev, Ieno (2012).
