Statistics Spotlight

2009
Statistics Roundtable: Raise Your Batting Average
Design of experiments has been an effective tool for experimenters, statisticians and quality professionals for years. DoE has evolved since the seminal work of Ronald A. Fisher in the 1920s and George E. P. Box and his colleagues in the 1950s and 1960s....
Statistics Roundtable: Divide and Conquer in Reliability Analyses
All product is not created equal. Some units are more likely to fail in service than others. Thus, in reliability evaluations, you need to identify subpopulations with different failure susceptibility....
Statistics Roundtable: Interval Training
Choosing the right type of interval provides a means of supplementing an estimated quantity with an appropriate calibration of the uncertainty associated with that value....
Statistics Roundtable: A Remedy Using Residuals
It is common in industrial processes for input variables to be closely associated with output variables. You may frequently encounter two process variables tied together. For example, consider temperature and pressure....
Statistics Roundtable: Drudgery to Strategy - a Statistical Metamorphosis
Think back to your Stats 101 course. You entered the first session laden with apprehension— induced by survivors’ horror stories—and your worst fears were confirmed....
Statistics Roundtable: Player Rankings
The coefficient of variation, sometimes called the relative standard deviation, is often used to assess the quality of an assay, the diversity in organizations or as a benchmark for ranking....
Statistics Roundtable: Grab the Brass Ring
Remember going to the amusement park and riding the carousel or merry-go-round? During the ride, there was sometimes a brass ring you could grab from a dispenser.It took some dexterity to snatch the ring from the dispenser as the carousel rotated....
Statistics Roundtable: A Correlation Encounter
In a recent visit to the control room for a processing unit, a new process engineer asks the question: “Why doesn’t the correlation between the two process variables, x1 and x2, match the correlation as suggested by the theory?”...
Statistics Roundtable: In a Certain Way
Whenever we estimate a population parameter from a sample, in addition to providing a point estimate, we should also include an interval to characterize the associated uncertainty....
Statistics Roundtable: Predicting Success
Considering that a phase three efficacy clinical trial for a potential new product could cost nearly $100 million, spending time in simulation activities before fully committing to developing a new product has proven to be worthwhile for more companies....
Statistics Roundtable: Care and Feeding of Checkweighers
Many years ago, during a tour of a production facility where packages of customer goods were being filled, a statistician colleague and I stood transfixed by an end-of-line checkweigher....
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