Category Archives: Statistics

PMean: They want a short biography from me

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I should have titled this page “I’m a Star!” because the School of Medicine’s Marketing and Communications Office is asking me questions to prepare a short biography to highlight the research I’m doing. Actually, that office is talking to over a hundred researchers in the School of Medicine, so I’m not really a star after all. But here are the questions that they started with. I’ll reply by email and they may get more information by email or a face-to-face interview. Makeup! Continue reading →

PMean: Exporting a graph in SAS

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I got a question about how to export a graph in SAS to a program like PowerPoint. There are several ways to do this, and I explained that you can right click on any graph that appears on your screen and copy it to the clipboard and then open up PowerPoint and right click on a slide and paste it in. That’s fairly standard on any Windows system. I presume that SAS supports similar approaches on the Macintosh and Linus, but I have no easy way of testing this.

But there are other ways to export a graph. You can tell SAS to save a particular graph to a file and then you can import that file into PowerPoint. It works, but there is a twist. Continue reading →

PMean: Tests of equivalence and non-inferiority

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I’m making a webinar presentation in April for The Analysis Factor. I’ve done this several times in the past. The talk in April will be on tests of equivalence and non-inferiority, a topic which I have covered briefly in my newsletter. I thought I’d share a first draft of the abstract here on my blog. Continue reading →

PMean: Peer grading in Introduction to R, SPSS, SAS

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I’ve gotten some helpful feedback that I need to encourage more interactions among students in the on-line classes, Introduction to R, Introduction to SPSS, and Introduction to SAS. No just interactions of the students with the teacher, but interactions between the students.

In many online classes this is done by encouraging online discussion of the material in the class. This is not so easy, however, for these three classes. I can just imagine myself posting the following on Blackboard. “Tell me what you think about the read.csv function in R.”

There are a couple of ways, however, that make sense for technical classes like these. Continue reading →

PMean: Changes to the Introduction to R, SAS, and SPSS classes

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I have helped develop and have taught (along with other faculty in our department) three one credit hour pass/fail classes: Introduction to R, Introduction to SPSS, and Introduction to SAS. These classes were developed back in 2014-2015 and they are in need of some serious updates. I will try to outline some of the updates that I think these classes need in this blog post. Continue reading →

PMean: Mixed up variable names in SAS

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Some of my students in the Introduction to SAS class were having trouble reading in a tab-delimited text file, and it’s not too surprising, because some of the student in the Introduction to R class were having problems with the same file. Here’s some details about the data set, what problems it caused, and a couple of ways that you could fix it. Continue reading →

PMean: Sentiment analysis of A Christmas Carol

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I was at an interesting talk about sentiment analysis and decided to try something simple myself. Sentiment analysis is a text analytics method that compares text data with a list of words with positive or negative sentiments. The relative frequency of the positive or negative words is a crude measure of the general sentiment of the text item. I ran a sentiment analysis on the text of the famous Charles Dickens novel, A Christmas Carol. Continue reading →