Beyond Basic Statistics: Tips, Tricks, and Techniques Every Data Analyst Should Know

PREFACE

I’ve had my share of mistakes: spilled coffee, insensitive remarks, and red socks thrown into a load of white laundry. These are daily occurrences in my life. But it isn’t these little, private mishaps that haunt me. It’s the big ones, the data analysis disasters, the public humiliations resulting from my own carelessness, mistakes that only reveal themselves when I’m standing in front of a room full of important people, declaring the brilliance of my statistical conclusions to the world.

Fortunately, these humiliations appear much more often in my dreams than they do in real life. When they do happen, however, they hit me when I least expect them, when I’m rushed, or when I’m overconfident in my results. All of them are accidental. I certainly never mean to misinform, but when you analyze as much data as I do, small mistakes are bound to happen every now and then.

This book highlights some of the well-known shortcomings of basic statistics, shortcomings that can, if ignored, lead to false conclusions. It provides tips and tricks to help you spot problem areas in your data analysis and covers techniques to help you overcome them. If, somewhere within the chapters of this book, you find information that prevents you from experiencing your own statistical humiliation, then exposing my own embarrassment will have been worth it.

KRISTIN H. JARMAN