With another Halloween almost upon us, here's a look back at some of the posts we've written about this holiday specifically, and about various creepy things in general. I hope that you enjoy this roundup of 13 scary statistics posts...and that they won't keep you up at night!
1. How to Make Minitab Wear a Halloween CostumeAs Halloween nears, you can customize your Minitab interface to match the season. Here's how...
2. Phantom Degrees of Freedom that Haunt Regression Models!I’m here to warn you about a ghoul that all statisticians and data scientists need to be aware of: phantom degrees of freedom...
3. Chi Square Analysis for Halloween: Is There a Slasher Movie Gender Gap?Chi-square analysis has many applications in business and quality improvement. For example, let's say you manage three call centers and you want to know if solving a customer's problem depends on which center gets the call. To find out, you tally the...
4. Poisson Rates and the Undead!What do zombies have to do with the 2-Sample Poisson Rate Test? Let’s say that your group of survivors is camping in an area that will soon be overrun by the undead zombie menace...
5. Spooky Tales from the Lab: The Horrors of Collecting Data with Frankenstein's FootData collection isn't always pretty. My lab worked with human cadavers. Usually not their entire body, but specifically their feet...
6. "The Thing" and Your Data: Meet the Shapeshifter DistributionThe 1982 film The Thing helped me get a handle on the Weibull distribution. In the film, Antarctic researchers encounter an alien with a truly frightening ability...
7. The Top 10 Halloween Content Creators on YouTubeOn Halloween, I usually dress up, pass out candy, and watch "It’s the Great Pumpkin, Charlie Brown" on TV. But I’m trying to broaden my horizons to include YouTube. I want to use data...
8. The Ghost Pattern: A Haunting Tale about Moving AveragesThat pattern in your time series plot...are you sure it's not a ghost? The trend that seems so evident might well be a phantom...
9. WHO Cares about How Much Sugar You Eat on HalloweenIt’s almost Halloween, so there’s lots to do. Of course, you have to plan your daily candy consumption to match the limits on free sugar recommended by the World Health Organization...
10. Laney P' Charts Show How Poe Creates IntensityIn “The Fall of the House of Usher,” the punctuation changes the rhythms of the story to create the intensity of the climax. Let’s look at these punctuation marks with Laney P’ Charts...
11. Interpreting Halloween Statistics with Binary Logistic RegressionThe National Retail Foundation (NRF) released the results of their Halloween Consumer Spending Survey last month. With Minitab, we can dig a little deeper into the data...
12. How to Be a Ghost Hunter with a Statistical MindsetI’ve gone ghost hunting a half-dozen times over the past 3 years. Now, I’m a skeptic and not a paranormal enthusiast. But being skeptical about something does not preclude collecting data about it...
13. Sample Size, Statistical Power, and the Revenge of the Zombie SalmonA dead salmon was placed in a functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) machine and shown emotionally charged photographs. Analysis of that fMRI data showed evidence of brain activity...in the dead, frozen salmon. Uh-oh, I thought. If dead salmon can think, could they also become reanimated...?
Happy Halloween!