Preliminaries

Introduction to
Statistical Investigations
Preliminaries
There are three parts to this preliminary section
• An overview of Statistics
• A quick look at some terms and concepts that
are used with quantitative data
• An exploration as to what probability is and how
we will use it to help us understand Statistics
Statistics vs. Anecdotal Evidence
• You probably have probably been told that
smoking causes cancer.
• Yet maybe someone has also said that my
grandmother lived to be 105 and she smoked a
pack of cigarettes a day and never got cancer.
• While it maybe true that someone could smoke
for years and never get cancer, if we look at the
data we see that those that smoke are more
likely to get cancer.
Do Vaccines Cause Autism?
• Nelson says it wasn't long after her son Parker's shots at
15 months that she noticed something was wrong.
• "He had run a slight fever after the vaccinations, but I
didn't think anything of it," said Nelson. “… about a week
after that he just completely stopped talking.“
• After months of worrying, wondering, and going back
and forth with doctors, an official diagnosis was made:
autism.
• "Gradually, I started piecing it together. He got sick after
his vaccinations and about a week later everything
changed. He was a completely different little boy then,"
said Nelson.
• Post hoc ergo propter hoc (after this, therefore because
of this) or simply called post hoc fallacy.
• If a rooster crows immediately before sunrise, does the
rooster cause the sun to rise?
http://www.wsaz.com/charleston/headlines/19376044.html
 Statistics
• Scientific conclusions cannot be based on
anecdotal evidence (like your grandma’s
story of that of one mother of an autistic
child). We need evidence from data.
• Statistics is the science of producing
useful data to address a research
question, analyzing the resulting data, and
drawing appropriate conclusions from the
data.
Six-Step
Statistical
Investigation
Method
 Example P.1: Organ Donations
• While a majority of people approve of organ
donation in principle, far less than that
actually sign up when getting a driver’s
license.
• Different states (and different countries) have
different recruiting methods.
• Do these different methods result in different
sign-up rates?
Recruiting Organ Donors
Step 1. Ask a Research Question
• In general: Is there a method that will increase
the likelihood that a person agrees to become an
organ donor.
• More specifically: Does the default option
presented to driver’s license applicants influence
the likelihood of someone becoming an organ
donor?
Recruiting Organ Donors
Step 2: Design a study and collect data
• The researchers decided to recruit various
participants and ask them to pretend to apply
for a new driver’s license.
• The participants did not know in advance that
different options were given for the donor
question, or even that this issue was the main
focus of the study.
Recruiting Organ Donors
Step 2: Design a study and collect data
• Some of the participants were forced to make a choice of
becoming a donor or not, without being given a default
option (the “neutral” group, Michigan’s current practice).
• Other participants were told that the default option was
not to be a donor but that they could choose to become
a donor if they wished (the “opt-in” group, Michigan’s
past practice).
• The remaining participants were told that the default
option was to be a donor but that they could choose not
to become a donor if they wished (the “opt-out” group,
some countries use this practice).
Recruiting Organ Donors
Step 3: Explore the data.
• 23 of 55 (41.8%)
participants in the opt-in
group agreed to become
organ donors
• 41 of 50 (82.0%)
participants in the opt-out
group agreed to become
organ donors
• 44 of the 56 (78.6%)
participants in the neutral
group agreed to become
organ donors
Recruiting Organ Donors
Step 4: Draw inferences beyond the data.
• Using methods that you will learn in this course, the
researchers analyzed whether the observed differences
between the groups was large enough to indicate that the
default option had a genuine effect.
• In particular, they reported strong evidence that the neutral
and opt-out versions do lead to a higher chance of agreeing to
become a donor, as compared to the opt-in version currently
used in many states.
• In fact, they could be quite confident that the neutral version
increases the chances that a person agrees to become a donor
by between 20 and 54 percentage points, a difference large
enough to save thousands of lives per year in the United
States.
Recruiting Organ Donors
Step 5: Formulate conclusions.
• Based on the analysis of the data and the design of the
study, the researchers concluded that the neutral version
causes an increase in the proportion who agree to
become donors over the opt-in.
• But because the participants in the study were
volunteers recruited from various general interest
Internet bulletin boards, generalizing conclusions beyond
these participants is only legitimate if they are
representative of a larger group of people. (The authors
believed their sample included a “broad range of
demographics.”)
Recruiting Organ Donors
Step 6: Look back and ahead.
• One limitation of the study is that participants were asked to
imagine how they would respond, which might not mirror
how people would actually respond in such a situation.
• A new study might look at people’s actual responses to
questions about organ donation or could monitor donor rates
for states that adopt a new policy.
• Researchers could also examine whether presenting
educational material on organ donation might increase
people’s willingness to donate.
• Another improvement would be to include participants from
wider demographic groups than these volunteers.
Terminology
• The individual entities on which data are recorded are called
observational units.
• The recorded characteristics of the observational units are the
variables of interest.
• Variables can be:
• Quantitative
• You can add, subtract, etc. with the values.
• Height, weight, distance, time…
• Categorical
• Labels for which arithmetic does not make sense.
• Sex, ethnicity, eye color…
• What are the observational units and variables in the Organ
Donation Study?
More Terminology
• The distribution of
variable describes the
pattern of
value/category
outcomes.
• For the organ donation
study the bar chart
shown displays the
distribution of
responses.
Old Faithful (Webcam Link)
Example P.2
Old Faithful
• How faithful is Old Faithful?
• Can the time of the next eruption be accurately
predicted?

Photo by Todd Swanson

Old Faithful
• Sign at the Old Faithful Geyser ranger station taken in 2005

Photo by Todd Swanson

Old Faithful
• Researchers collected data on 222 eruptions taken over a
number of days in the summers of 1978 and 1979.
• The results are shown in a dotplot.
Old Faithful
• What are the observational units and variable in this
study?
• Is the variable quantitative or categorical?
• We can see from the dotplot that Old Faithful is not
perfectly predictable.
• The time until the next eruption varies from eruption to
eruption.
• This variability is the most fundamental property in
studying Statistics. Without variability, we wouldn’t
need statistics.
Old Faithful
• Let’s take another look at the dotplot and describe the
distribution.
• What could be some explanations for the variability?
Old Faithful
• One explanation could be the duration of previous
eruption (short: < 3.5 min. or long > 3.5 min.)
Old Faithful

Summer 2005:
Note the average
eruption interval is
very different than it
was in the 1970s as
the result of an
earthquake in the
1980s.
Photo by Todd Swanson
Old Faithful
• One way to measure the center of a distribution
is with the average, also called the mean.
• One way to measure variability is with the
standard deviation, which is roughly the average
distance between a data value in the distribution
and the mean of the distribution
• What is the standard deviation of the data set {7,7,7,7,7}?
• Which data set has the largest standard deviation?
• A {1, 3, 3, 3, 3, 3, 7}
• B {1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7}
• C {1, 1, 1, 4, 7, 7, 7}
Old Faithful
Mean SD
Overall 71.0 12.8
After short duration 56.3 8.5
After long duration 78.7 6.3
Old Faithful
Basic Terminology
• Some aspects to look for in a distribution of a
quantitative variable are:
• Shape: Is the distribution symmetric? Mound-shaped?
Are there several peaks or clusters?
• Center: Where is the distribution centered? What is a
typical value?
• Variability: How spread out are the data? Are most
within a certain range of values?
• Unusual observations: Are there outliers that deviate
markedly from the overall pattern of the other data
values? Are there other unusual features in the
distribution?
Learning Objectives for
Preliminaries
• Describe how the six steps of a statistical
investigation apply to a particular statistical
study.
• Identify the observational units and variables in
a statistical study.
• Classify variables as categorical or quantitative.
• Write a paragraph describing a distribution of a
quantitative variable as presented in a dotplot,
addressing aspects of shape, center, variability,
and unusual observations.
Learning Objectives for
Preliminaries
• Compare centers, variability and shapes between
two or more distributions displayed in dotplots.
• Realize that long-term relative frequency can be
used to estimate probability.
• Understand that for a random processes with
unknown probabilities, we can approximate
probabilities with simulation (artificially re-
creating the process a large number of times)