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Lecture

Understanding Statistics & Experimental Design

In course

BIO-449: Understanding statistics and experimental design

This course is neither an introduction to the mathematics of statistics nor an introduction to a statistics program such as R. The aim of the course is to understand statistics from its experimental design and to avoid common pitfalls of statistical reason ...

Description

This lecture covers various topics related to statistics and experimental design. It discusses the concepts of Type I and Type II errors, population distributions, sampling distributions, t-distribution critical values, implications of sample size, null results, and the confusion between significance and effect size. The instructor emphasizes the importance of interpreting statistical results correctly, avoiding misinterpretations, and understanding the implications of small effect sizes. The lecture also touches on the challenges of publishing null results, the normativity of statistics, the Bayes approach, and the significance of small effects. Overall, it provides insights into statistical analysis and experimental design principles.

Instructor

Michael Herzog

Official source

Ontological neighbourhood

Statistics

Statistical inference: Mathematical statistics

Related concepts (32)

Statistics

Statistics (from German: Statistik, () "description of a state, a country") is the discipline that concerns the collection, organization, analysis, interpretation, and presentation of data. In applying statistics to a scientific, industrial, or social problem, it is conventional to begin with a statistical population or a statistical model to be studied. Populations can be diverse groups of people or objects such as "all people living in a country" or "every atom composing a crystal".

Probability distribution

In probability theory and statistics, a probability distribution is the mathematical function that gives the probabilities of occurrence of different possible outcomes for an experiment. It is a mathematical description of a random phenomenon in terms of its sample space and the probabilities of events (subsets of the sample space). For instance, if X is used to denote the outcome of a coin toss ("the experiment"), then the probability distribution of X would take the value 0.5 (1 in 2 or 1/2) for X = heads, and 0.

Student's t-distribution

In probability and statistics, Student's t-distribution (or simply the t-distribution) is a continuous probability distribution that generalizes the standard normal distribution. Like the latter, it is symmetric around zero and bell-shaped. However, has heavier tails and the amount of probability mass in the tails is controlled by the parameter . For the Student's t distribution becomes the standard Cauchy distribution, whereas for it becomes the standard normal distribution .

Normal distribution

In statistics, a normal distribution or Gaussian distribution is a type of continuous probability distribution for a real-valued random variable. The general form of its probability density function is The parameter is the mean or expectation of the distribution (and also its median and mode), while the parameter is its standard deviation. The variance of the distribution is . A random variable with a Gaussian distribution is said to be normally distributed, and is called a normal deviate.

Null hypothesis

In scientific research, the null hypothesis (often denoted H0) is the claim that no relationship exists between two sets of data or variables being analyzed. The null hypothesis is that any experimentally observed difference is due to chance alone, and an underlying causative relationship does not exist, hence the term "null". In addition to the null hypothesis, an alternative hypothesis is also developed, which claims that a relationship does exist between two variables.

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Related concepts (32)

Statistics

Probability distribution

Student's t-distribution

Normal distribution

Null hypothesis