Choosing and Using Statistics

Book excerpt: The first edition of this excellent handbook was extremely wellreceived by both students and lecturers alike. It has helped tosimplify the often complex and difficult task of choosing and usingthe right statistics package. This is a book for any student or professional biologist whowants to process data using a statistical package on the computer,to select appropriate methods, and extract the importantinformation from the often confusing output that is produced. It isaimed primarily at undergraduates and masters students in thebiological sciences who have to apply statistics in practicalclasses and projects. Such users of statistics do not have tounderstand either how tests work or how to do the calculations, andthese aspects are not covered in the book. The new edition has been updated to cover the very latestversions of the computer packages described, expanded to includecoverage for logistic regression, a more detailed consideration ofmultivariate analysis, data exploration and further examples ofPrinciple Component Analysis and Discriminate Function Analysis aregiven. New edition will use SPSS 10.0, Minitab 13.1 and Excel2000. New simplified version of the Key and flow chart of decisionsto reach simple statistical tests. Section on multivariate techniques expanded to give furtherexamples of PCA and DFA. Aimed at students using statistics for projects and inpractical classes. Statistical jargon explained through an extensive glossary andkey to symbols. Stresses the importance of experimental design, measurement ofdata and interpretation of results rather than an understanding ofthe statistical tests themselves.