Statistics Flashcards
What are the two main types of data
quantitative
qualitative
What is ordinal data
the data can be given a meaningful order
What is nominal data
there is no relationship that is meaningful in terms of order of the categories ie. it is just name e.g. atkins diet and paleo diet
What is binomial data
there are only two options e.g. yes or no
What is a random sample
one in which each member of the population has an equally likely non zero chance of being included
what is a stratified sample
one in which certain categories of the population must be represented e.g. if we know the library is 50 percent history books, 30 percent science and 20 percent others. in a sample of 20 we must select 10 history books, 6 science and 4 others.
what is a convienience sample
one that is not chosen randomly but is all that is available eg. all patients at an outpatient dermatology clinic
when would you use a bar or pie chart
categorical data
when would you use histograms, stem and leaf plots and box and whisker plots
to visualise continuous data
what does a scatter plot show
the relationship between two variable and how one changes in relation to the other
when would you use the mean and when would you use the median to describe the centrality of data
mean - normal distriuted not skewed data
media- if data is more skewed or significant outlier
mode- used for qualitative data
what do you do differently when calculating the sample variance/sd as opposed to the population
use n-1 as the denominator instead of n
what does the standard deviation show
the spread of the data
what does positively skewed mean
that more of the values are clusted towards the bottome of the scale - such as alcohol intake
what is negatively skewed
most of the values are clustered at the higher range of the scale - rare in clinical data
what is the coefficient of skewness
a value which shows how skewed the data is - the closes to 0 the more symmetrical the data
what does a value of 0 for the kurtosis mean
indicates that the shape of the data is close to the normal distribution
what is inference
making predictions about a population based on the data collected from a smaller sample or series of smaller samples
what are the characteristics of a normal distribution
continuous symmetrical bell shaped curve mean, median and mode are equal single central peak values between -infinity and +infinity
what is the binomial distribution
for binary data e.g. dead/alive, male/female
what is the poisson distribution
for events which occur at random intervals of time or space e.g. deaths per year.
rare events
what is the mean and sd of a standard normal distributions
mean = 0
sd = 1
we write z~ N (0,1)
where would you expect 95 percent of values to like in normally distributed data
mean +/- 1.96 x SD
how can you assess the normality of data
Informal review of properties of normal distribution
Inspection of a normal plot
Shapiro- Wilk test