Advanced Statistics Demystified | Date: 28 April 2011, 08:58
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Advanced Statistics Demystified
By Larry Stephens, Larry Stephens
* Publisher: McGraw-Hill Professional
* Number Of Pages: 350
* Publication Date: 2004-06-01
* ISBN-10 / ASIN: 0071432426
* ISBN-13 / EAN: 9780071432429
Product Description:
TAKE THE "MEAN" OUT OF ADVANCED STATISTICS
Now anyone who has mastered basic statistics can easily take the next step up. In Advanced Statistics Demystified, experienced statistics instructor Larry J. Stephens provides an effective, anxiety-soothing, and totally painless way to learn advanced statistics -- from inferential statistics, variance analysis, and parametric and nonparametric testing to simple linear regression, correlation, and multiple regression.
With Advanced Statistics Demystified, you master the subject one simple step at a time -- at your own speed. This unique self-teaching guide offers exercises at the end of each chapter to pinpoint weaknesses and two 50-question "final exams" to reinforce the entire book.
If you want to build or refresh your understanding of advanced statistics, here's a fast and entertaining self-teaching course that's specially designed to reduce anxiety.
Get ready to:
* Draw inferences by comparing means, percents, and variances from two different samples
* Compare more than two means with variance analysis
* Make accurate interpretations with simple linear regression and correlation
* Derive inferences, estimations, and predictions with multiple regression models
* Apply nonparametric tests when the assumptions for the parametric tests are not satisfied
* Take two "final exams" and grade them yourself!
Simple enough for beginners but challenging enough for advanced students, Advanced Statistics Demystified is your direct route to confident, sophisticated statistical analysis!
Summary: Great book for how to use Minitab and Excel for statistical analysis
Rating: 4
What initially interested me in this book was its promise to show the reader how to use Excel for statistical analysis. In this respect, the book did not disappoint. What did disappoint, however, was how little advanced statistical analysis one can do with Excel. If you're new to statistics as I was, this may come as a surprise. If you assume Excel is as good as it gets for statistical analysis, well, you're wrong. That's where the book veers into Minitab.
Minitab is pure statistical software. It looks a lot like Excel, but is much more powerful where statistical analysis is concerned. If you want to do Advanced Statistics, then you need to invest in something like Minitab. There are other options, such as R, SAS, Matlab, etc. But this book chooses to focus on Minitab, probably because of its familiar interface and relatively low purchase price ($100).
I went ahead and took the plunge and obtained a copy of Minitab. This decision made the book much more valuable to me. As you get deeper into the book, many of the different analysis types can only be done (easily) with specialized software such as Minitab.
I completed the examples and exercises from start to finish and found the book to be very educational. You learn how to carry out the analysis, why you would want to do it, and how to interpret the results. What you do NOT get is mathematical justification for the analysis techniques. While this would be nice to have, I can see how it would seriously sidetrack the focus of this book (and triple its size). If you want to know, say, why Multiple Regression works or the theory behind ANOVA tables, then buy a textbook or go back to school. But if you want to simply learn how to perform statistical analysis using Minitab and Excel, this is a great book to start with.
One complaint/suggestion: it would be nice if the publisher provided a companion web site for the book where the reader could download the example and exercise data sets. If you want to follow along with an example or perform an exercise, you have to manually enter the data. To his credit, the author keeps most of the data sets small and manageable, but there are a few that are too unwieldy for manual entry. That's the reason for 4 stars instead of 5.
A final comment: I bought this book in the summer of 2008 to work through in preparation for starting a graduate program in statistics. I had no delusions it would put me ahead of my classmates or give me an edge. I was just looking for some exposure to advanced topics. After my first semester, in which I mainly studied linear models, I revisted the book and found it to be even more valuable. Where my graduate school classes focused on mathematical motivation of analysis, this book is about application and interpretation of analysis. Re-reading it after some graduate work helped pull together some of the major themes of statistical analysis and gave much needed meaning and context to what I had just learned.
If you're serious about advanced statistical analysis and willing to drop $100 on Minitab, then I highly recommend this book.
Summary: One big problem that reviews overlooked
Rating: 1
I'm a graduate student and I have a fair understanding of basic statistics. I browsed through many titles in the hopes of finding a book that was easy to understand (statistics for dummies, intermediate statistics for dummies, etc.) and I found out that all of the books were very descriptive...without having good samples that I could run "statistical analysis" on. This book piqued my interest because the book incorporated the use of microsoft excel to demonstrate how these analysis were done. I thought this was a great idea b/c I would probably be running my data through excel and this would help me learn the material easily. However, I soon realized that you needed another program called minitab (costs 100$) to follow these examples. I simply cannot justify paying for this program at this point in time. If you are ok paying 100$ for this program to use the book then go ahead and purchase this book. If not, you're better off looking for another book...
Summary: Not very advanced
Rating: 2
This book reads well, but is only good as a very general overview of the subject. Do not buy this book if you are needing a supplement for a college level course, it does not go into enough detail.
Summary: Good for a refresher or as a supplementary source
Rating: 4
The use you can get from this book depends on how much you already know about statistics. I found this book to be a great refresher on advanced statistics and set up in a very user friendly manner for someone like me. However, I can see where someone who does not know much about statistics, like a previous reviewer, might be confused or frustrated. The author goes right to the meat of statistics without much lead in. Plus, there is little or no explanation as to why the book is set up as it is, and the logic might not be apparent to a novice. However, for those familiar with stats, it is easy to go right to where you need help or a refresher.
As to how it is set up....I like that the book starts with a discussion of populations and samples, because you have to understand them in order to accurately select your analysis. I also like that the author starts with simple analyses-single poulation and sample means-and as the book goes on describes more and more complicated analyses. The author describes each analysis, a little about why you use it, gives you an example, and provides some sample data. Then, the data is analyzed using Excel or Minitab, and the author tells you exactly how to do it. This is my favorite feature. I've always used Excel and SPSS, so learning how to do Minitab was a nice bonus. But just showing you how to analyze the data using a statistics program at all, rather than getting bogged down in the math was awsome. I can't think of any other stats book that does that, and sad to say, I've read a few.
B
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