I started when I was an undergraduate physics major. My entire statistics education consisted of thirty minutes being told not to use R^2. I started reading about statistical abuses and realized that I would probably have committed most of them had I published research -- my training was entirely inadequate. Most scientists do only slightly better.
Combine this with a bit of unhealthy obsession and I ended up with 14,000 words of explanation, which I promptly published online.
My current draft is at 28,000 words and climbing, but I'm having more fun writing than figuring out what to do with it. I'm quietly hoping a serious publisher will notice and approach me, saving me the effort of writing a proposal and getting it rejected however many times before someone picks it up.
(happy to share a draft with anyone interested! Email is in my profile)
Interesting. My statistics knowledge has become rusty lately. I want to re-learn the basics before reading this.
Can you tell me any resource (doesn't necessarily have to be a book)?
P.S: I'm interested in knowing stuff like 'why square-root of variance is standard deviation?". Concepts.
It's a free online statistics textbook, also available in print. I haven't used it extensively, so I can't vouch for its quality -- actually, I complain about it a bit in Statistics Done Wrong. But I've never come across a very good conceptual introduction to statistics, so this is roughly the best I know.
There are also amusing variations, like the cartoon guide to statistics:
At the time the website was done, I hadn't sufficiently hacked Sphinx to make good PDFs. My current draft has a nice PDF but it's still incomplete -- a couple half-finished chapters and such.
I am also wondering whether I should release the PDF at all, if I could publish or self-publish it later.
http://www.refsmmat.com/statistics/
I started when I was an undergraduate physics major. My entire statistics education consisted of thirty minutes being told not to use R^2. I started reading about statistical abuses and realized that I would probably have committed most of them had I published research -- my training was entirely inadequate. Most scientists do only slightly better.
Combine this with a bit of unhealthy obsession and I ended up with 14,000 words of explanation, which I promptly published online.
My current draft is at 28,000 words and climbing, but I'm having more fun writing than figuring out what to do with it. I'm quietly hoping a serious publisher will notice and approach me, saving me the effort of writing a proposal and getting it rejected however many times before someone picks it up.
(happy to share a draft with anyone interested! Email is in my profile)