Statistical Analysis Simplified

Statistical Data Analysis Explained

Few books on statistical data analysis in the natural sciences are written at a level that a non-statistician will easily understand. This is a book written in colloquial language, avoiding mathematical formulae as much as possible, trying to explain statistical methods using examples and graphics instead. To use the book efficiently, readers should have some computer experience. The book starts with the simplest of statistical concepts and carries readers forward to a deeper and more extensive understanding of the use of statistics in environmental sciences. The book concerns the application of statistical and other computer methods to the management, analysis and display of spatial data. These data are characterised by including locations (geographic coordinates), which leads to the necessity of using maps to display the data and the results of the statistical methods. Although the book uses examples from applied geochemistry, and a large geochemical survey in particular, the principles and ideas equally well apply to other natural sciences, e.g., environmental sciences, pedology, hydrology, geography, forestry, ecology, and health sciences/epidemiology. The book is unique because it supplies direct access to software solutions (based on R, the Open Source version of the S-language for statistics) for applied environmental statistics. For all graphics and tables presented in the book, the R-scripts are provided in the form of executable R-scripts. In addition, a graphical user interface for R, called DAS+R, was developed for convenient, fast and interactive data analysis. Statistical Data Analysis Explained: Applied Environmental Statistics with R provides, on an accompanying website, the software to undertake all the procedures discussed, and the data employed for their description in the book.

Statistical Analysis and Data Display

1 Audience Students seeking master's degrees in applied statistics in the late 1960s and 1970s typically took a year-long sequence in statistical methods. Popular choices of the course text book in that period prior to the availability of high speed computing and graphics capability were those authored by Snedecor and Cochran, and Steel and Torrie. By 1980, the topical coverage in these classics failed to include a great many new and important elementary techniques in the data analyst's toolkit. In order to teach the statistical methods sequence with adequate coverage of topics, it became necessary to draw material from each of four or five text sources. Obviously, such a situation makes life difficult for both students and instructors. In addition, statistics students need to become proficient with at least one high-quality statistical software package. This book can serve as a standalone text for a contemporary year-long course in statistical methods at a level appropriate for statistics majors at the master's level or other quantitatively oriented disciplines at the doctoral level. The topics include both concepts and techniques developed many years ago and a variety of newer tools not commonly found in textbooks.

Basic Statistical Analysis