Basic Statistical Analysis
Get introduced to some basic statistical analyses.
Let’s get introduced to some basic statistical analyses using R. We are using the RxP.clean dataset. We will cover the following topics:
- Assessing data normality
- Some basic non-parametric statistics
- Student’s t-test
- One-way Analysis of Variance (ANOVA)
Determining what type of analysis to do
We’ve now seen how to use a function like qplot() to look at our data in various ways. For example, we can plot a histogram of our response variable and see how it’s distributed. However, as we move beyond the initial steps of data exploration and start to think about data analysis, there are several questions we should ask ourselves.
Most importantly, we should ask, “What kind of data do we have?” This may seem like a simple question at first, but it’s paramount for determining the analyses we’ll conduct. When we talk about data, are we talking about our response or our predictor variables?
The answer is both, of course. Knowing the shape of our response and predictor variables will determine what sort of analysis we’ll do. In addition to simply knowing if the data is normal or not, we should be mindful of whether we have one predictor or multiple predictors and if our predictors are continuous (a bunch of numbers) or discrete (different categories).
For this lesson and the next, we’ll analyze data where the response ...