Statistics Hacks

Preface

Chance plays a huge part in your life, whether you know it or not. Your particular genetic makeup mutated slightly when you were created, and it did so based on specific laws of probability. Performance in school involves human errors, yours and others', which tends to keep your actual ability level from being reflected precisely in your report card or on those high-stakes tests. Research on careers even suggests that what you do for a living was probably not a result of careful planning and preparation, but more likely due to happenstance. And, of course, chance determines your fate in games of chance and plays a large role in the outcome of sporting events.

Fortunately, an entire set of scientific tools, the various applications of statistics, can be used to solve the problems caused by our fate-influenced system. Inferential statistics, a field of science based entirely on the nature of probability, allows us to understand the way things work, discover relationships among variables, describe a huge population by seeing just a small bit of it, make uncannily accurate predictions, and, yes, even make a little money with a well-placed wager here and there.

This book is a collection of statistical tricks and tools. Statistics Hacks presents useful tools from statistics, of course, but also from the realms of educational and psychological measurement and experimental research design. It provides solutions to a variety of problems in the world of social science, but also in the ...