Statistics

The statistics portal might become a central place for everything related to statistical analysis in biological research. As a central starting point it might provide links to pages discussing individual statistical topics in detail as well as listing useful software and recommended external web pages. Help it grow by contributing content.

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Topics BMJ Statistical Notes series representing data numerically representing data graphically significance tests guide to Excel for statistics add a topic Software guide to statistics software R Statistics SPSS, SAS Microsoft's Excel and OpenOffice's Calc are of limited use for statistical analysis add here

Quotes Facts are stubborn things, but statistics are more pliable. Mark Twain (1835 - 1910) Statistics: The only science that enables different experts using the same figures to draw different conclusions. Evan Esar (1899 - 1995) I gather, young man, that you wish to be a Member of Parliament. The first lesson that you must learn is, when I call for statistics about the rate of infant mortality, what I want is proof that fewer babies died when I was Prime Minister than when anyone else was Prime Minister. That is a political statistic. Sir Winston Churchill (1874 - 1965) Smoking is one of the leading causes of statistics. Fletcher Knebel There are three kinds of lies: lies, damned lies, and statistics. Benjamin Disraeli (1804 - 1881)

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Recommended Links Background reading from the Wikipedia: biostatistics measures of central tendency: mean, median, mode normal distributions: normal distribution, standard deviation, variance, standard error of the mean from the Wikipedia significance tests: significance, confidence interval, t test, ANOVA from the add a link here Forums: Bioinformatics & biostatistics subforum at protocol-online.org. This subforum is mostly bioinformatics with only some statistics threads. The forum is very active with over 20k registered members and usually >200 users online. add here Tutorials: The really easy statistics site by Jim Deacon, Uni of Edinburgh - great starting point Statistical Notes Series by BMJ, listed on Jerry Dallal's page - very accessible article series on statistics in medicine Intuitive Biostatistics, chapter 37: Choosing a statistical test and chapter 12: Interpreting nonsignificant p values from the site of the GraphPad software Online books: Electronic Statistics Textbook by StatSoft Visual Statistics Book by Cruise Scientific HyperStat statistics textbook by David Lane (prof. for psychology & statistics)