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Applying DOE for Great Grilling, part 2
Design of Experiments is an extremely powerful statistical method, and we added a DOE tool to the Assistant in Minitab 17 to make it more accessible to more people.Since it's summer grilling season,...
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Using Marginal Plots, aka "Stuffed-Crust Charts"
In my last post, we took the red pill and dove deep into the unarguably fascinating and uncompromisingly compelling world of the matrix plot. I've stuffed this post with information about a topic of...
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Does Major League Baseball Really Need the Second Half of the Season?
When you perform a statistical analysis, you want to make sure you collect enough data that your results are reliable. But you also want to avoid wasting time and money collecting more data than you...
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A Visual Look at Baseball's All-Star Teams
Last Tuesday Night, Major League Baseball announced the rosters for tomorrow's All-Star game in San Diego. Immediately, as I'm sure was anticipated, people began talking about who made it and who...
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What Were the Odds of Getting into Willy Wonka's Chocolate Factory?
In the great 1971 movie Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory, the reclusive owner of the Wonka Chocolate Factory decides to place golden tickets in five of his famous chocolate bars, and allow the...
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DOE Center Points: What They Are & Why They're Useful
Design of Experiments (DOE) is the perfect tool to efficiently determine if key inputs are related to key outputs. Behind the scenes, DOE is simply a regression analysis. What’s not simple, however, is...
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Conditional Formatting of Large Residuals and Unusual Combinations of Predictors
If you've used our software, you’re probably used to many of the things you can do in Minitab once you’ve fit a model. For example, after you fit a response to a given model for some predictors with...
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High Cpk and a Funny-Looking Histogram: Is My Process Really that Amazing?
Here is a scenario involving process capability that we’ve seen from time to time in Minitab's technical support department. I’m sharing the details in this post so that you’ll know where to look if...
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Can Regression and Statistical Software Help You Find a Great Deal on a Used...
You need to consider many factors when you’re buying a used car. Once you narrow your choice down to a particular car model, you can get a wealth of information about individual cars on the market...
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On Paying Bills, Marriage, and Alert Systems
When I blogged about automation back in March, I made my husband out to be an automation guru. Well, he certainly is. But what you don’t know about my husband is that while he loves to automate...
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One-Sample t-test: Calculating the t-statistic is not really a bear
While some posts in our Minitab blog focus on understanding t-tests and t-distributions this post will focus more simply on how to hand-calculate the t-value for a one-sample t-test (and how to...
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Model Fit: Don't be Blinded by Numerical Fundamentalism
Statistics is all about modelling. But that doesn’t mean strutting down the catwalk with a pouty expression. It means we’re often looking for a mathematical form that best describes relationships...
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All About Run Charts
I blogged a few months back about three different Minitab tools you can use to examine your data over time. Did you know you that you can also use a simple run chart to display how your process data...
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Have You Accidentally Done Statistics?
Have you ever accidentally done statistics? Not all of us can (or would want to) be “stat nerds,” but the word “statistics” shouldn’t be scary. In fact, we all analyze things that happen to us every...
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Analyzing the Jaywalking Habits of New England Wildlife
My recent beach vacation began with the kind of unfortunate incident that we all dread: killing a distant relative. It was about 3 a.m. Me, my two sons, and our dog had been on the road since about 7...
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Analyzing the History of Olympic Events with Time Series
The Olympic games are about to begin in Rio de Janeiro. Over the next 16 days, more than 11,000 athletes from 206 countries will be competing in 306 different events. That's the most events ever in any...
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Correlation: What It Shows You (and What It Doesn't)
Often, when we start analyzing new data, one of the very first things we look at is whether certain pairs of variables are correlated. Correlation can tell if two variables have a linear relationship,...
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When Should You Mistrust Statistics?
Figures lie, so they say, and liars figure. A recent post at Ben Orlin's always-amusing mathwithbaddrawings.com blog nicely encapsulates why so many people feel wary about anything related to...
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Process Capability Statistics: Cpk vs. Ppk
Back when I used to work in Minitab Tech Support, customers often asked me, “What’s the difference between Cpk and Ppk?” It’s a good question, especially since many practitioners default to using Cpk...
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Taking a Stratified Sample in Minitab Statistical Software
The Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS) updated their star ratings on July 27. Turns out, the list of hospitals are a great way to look at how easy it is to get random samples from data...
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