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A Simple Guide to Multivariate Control Charts
This is an era of massive data. A huge amount of data is being generated from the web and from customer relations records, not to mention also from sensors used in the manufacturing industry...
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A Six Sigma Healthcare Project, part 1: Examining Factors with a Pareto Chart
Over the past year I've been able to work with and learn from practitioners and experts who are using data analysis and Six Sigma to improve the quality of healthcare, both in terms of operational...
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A Six Sigma Healthcare Project, part 2: Visualizing the Impact of Individual...
My previous post covered the initial phases of a project to attract and retain more patients in a cardiac rehabilitation program, as described in a 2011 Quality Engineering article. A Pareto chart of...
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Regression versus ANOVA: Which Tool to Use When
Suppose you’ve collected data on cycle time, revenue, the dimension of a manufactured part, or some other metric that’s important to you, and you want to see what other variables may be related to it....
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The Life You Improve May Be Your Own: Honing Healthcare with Statistical Data...
What does the eyesight of a homeless person have in common with complications from dental anesthesia? Or with reducing side-effects from cancer? Or monitoring artificial hip implants?These are all...
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3 Ways to Get Up and Running with Statistical Software—Fast
The last thing you want to do when you purchase a new piece of software is spend an excessive amount of time getting up and running. You’ve probably been ready to the use the software since, well,...
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A Six Sigma Healthcare Project, part 3: Creating a Binary Logistic Regression...
In part 2 of this series, we used graphs and tables to see how individual factors affected rates of patient participation in a cardiac rehabilitation program. This initial look at the data indicated...
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A Six Sigma Healthcare Project, part 4: Predicting Patient Participation with...
By looking at the data we have about 500 cardiac patients, we've learned that easy access to the hospital and good transportation are key factors influencing participation in a rehabilitation...
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Poisson Data: Examining the Number Deaths in an Episode of Game of Thrones
There may not be a situation more perilous than being a character on Game of Thrones. Warden of the North, Hand of the King, and apparent protagonist of the entire series? Off with your head before the...
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Fitting an ARIMA Model
Time series data is proving to be very useful these days in a number of different industries. However, fitting a specific model is not always a straightforward process. It requires a good look at the...
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The Matrix, It's a Complex Plot
Remember the classic science fiction film The Matrix? The dark sunglasses, the leather, computer monitors constantly raining streams of integers (inexplicably in base 10 rather than binary or...
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Using Multivariate Statistical Tools to Analyze Customer and Survey Data
Businesses are getting more and more data from existing and potential customers: whenever we click on a web site, for example, it can be recorded in the vendor's database. And whenever we use...
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Using Fitness Tracker Data to Make Wise Decisions: Are You Working Out in the...
Technology is very much part of our lives nowadays. We use our smartphones to have video calls with our friends and family, and watch our favourite TV shows on tablets. Technology has also transformed...
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2 Reasons 2 Recode Data and How 2 Do It in Less than 2 Minutes
It’s not easy to get data ready for analysis. Sometimes, data that include all the details we want aren’t clean enough for analysis. Even stranger, sometimes the exact opposite can be true: Data that...
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How to Identify Outliers (and Get Rid of Them)
An outlier is an observation in a data set that lies a substantial distance from other observations. These unusual observations can have a disproportionate effect on statistical analysis, such as the...
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There Is No Such Thing as “Bad” Data: Top Tips to Avoid Bad Analysis
You often hear the data being blamed when an analysis is not delivering the answers you wanted or expected. I was recently reminded that the data chosen or collected for a specific analysis is...
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Using the Nelson Rules for Control Charts in Minitab
by Matthew Barsalou, guest bloggerControl charts plot your process data to identify and distinguish between common cause and special cause variation. This is important, because identifying the...
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Those 10 Simple Rules for Using Statistics? They're Not Just for Research
Earlier this month, PLOS.org published an article titled "Ten Simple Rules for Effective Statistical Practice." The 10 rules are good reading for anyone who draws conclusions and makes decisions based...
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QI Trends in Healthcare: What Are the Statistical "Soft Spots"?
It's been called a "demographic watershed". In the next 15 years alone, the worldwide population of individuals aged 65 and older is projected to increase more than 60%, from 617 million to about 1...
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Applying DOE for Great Grilling, part 1
Design of Experiments (DOE) has a reputation for difficulty, and to an extent, this statistical method deserves that reputation. While it's easy to grasp the basic idea—acquire the maximum amount of...
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