Description
Statistics is central in the biosciences, social sciences and other disciplines, yet many students often struggle to learn how to perform statistical tests, and to understand how and why statistical tests work. Although there are many approaches to teaching statistics, a common framework exists between them: starting with probability and distributions, then sampling from distribution and descriptive statistics and later introducing both simple and complex statistical tests, typically ending with regression analysis (linear models).
This book proposes to reverse the way statistics is taught, by starting with the introduction of linear models. Today, many statisticians know that the one unifying principle of statistical tests is that most of them are instances of linear models. This teaching method has two advantages: all statistical tests in a course can be presented under the same unifying framework, simplifying things; second, linear models can be expressed as lines over squared paper, replacing any equation with a drawing.
This book explains how and why statistics works without using a single equation, just lines and squares over grid paper. The reader will have the opportunity to work through the examples and compute sums of squares by just drawing and counting, and finally evaluating whether observed differences are statistically significant by using the tables provided. Intended for students, scientists and those with little prior knowledge of statistics, this book is for all with simple and clear examples, computations and drawings helping the reader to not only do statistical tests but also understand statistics.
Table of Contents
Before we start… 1. What is statistics? 2. Know your samples 3. Estimating populations 4. The design of experiments 5. Comparing two variances 6. One sample 7. Two samples 8. Why squares? (At last!) 9. More than two samples 10. Two-way 11. Regression 12. What if my data is not “normal”? 13. Counting 14. Size, power and effects 15. Before we finish… 16. Statistical tables 17. Solution to exercises
