Statistics Roundtable
2012
Statistics Roundtable: Inquiry on Pedigree
THE MEDIA FREQUENTLY report on examples of situations in which results from statistical studies are not reproducible. A recent article in the New York Times reported how a sophisticated study went wrong because of poor data quality....
Statistics Roundtable: Improve Your Evaluations
In an earlier Statistics Roundtable column, we described how the conclusions you can draw from statistical analysis of limited life data can be bolstered by appropriately incorporating engineering knowledge and experience into the analysis....
Statistics Roundtable: Weighing Your Options
When we are faced with choosing the best solution for a problem, most of us are very good at picking the right solution if there’s only a single quantitative objective over which to optimize....
Statistics Roundtable: Fleshing Things Out
Recently, a colleague asked me to review some data that a student had gathered on cannibalization in spiders. They had 10 families of spiders, and each family had 14 members. We’ll call the families A, B, C, etc. The families were randomly paired off....
Statistics Roundtable: Go With the Flow
Years ago, while on my way to conduct a statistical process control short course at a local ASQ meeting, I was stopped by a man who told me he had attended my short course the previous year and got a lot out of it....
Statistics Roundtable: Words of Caution
Suppose you have a study with one identified response. Take QP’s salary survey, for instance, and the many predictors, such as age, sex, education, years of experience, type of employment and number of people supervised....
Statistics Roundtable: Going on Feel
Customers consider consistent quality to be one of the most important product and service attributes. Often, it’s the most important....
Statistics Roundtable: On Overlapping
While teaching a workshop for a small manufacturing firm, two of the participants approached me to discuss what seemed to be a simple problem they had encountered at work....
Statistics Roundtable: Right Answer, Wrong Query
Recently, I was reminded of one of my favorite statistics-related quotes from John W. Tukey: “Far better an approximate answer to the right question, which is often vague, than an exact answer to the wrong question, which can always be made precise.”...
Statistics Roundtable: Gage R&R Reminders
Major characteristic specification limits of a popular brand were 3% and 4%. Product with lower than 3% lacked consumer appeal, and product with greater than 4% had reduced shelf life....
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