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remedial stats education

4 messages · Chris Buddenhagen, vincent@7d4.com, Joshua N Pritikin

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In short:

I didn't take enough stats courses in college.  Now I am working on scientific
research and I feel somewhat lost when it comes to designing the statistical
framework.  I have looked through the books at:

  http://www.r-project.org/doc/bib/R-books.html

I even tried to read [17] Julian J. Faraway. Linear Models with R.  This book
is too advanced.  It helped a little bit but I still feel lost.  Can somebody
recommend a textbook or textbooks suitable for a self-study stats course?

Brief bio:

I have 20 years background in software development.  I know lots of
computer languages including C++ and Perl.  The computer language aspects of R
seems fairly simple.  I did some calculus in college but not more than 1-2
courses.  I have a basic understanding of probability.  I mostly understand
descriptive statistics.  I feel somewhat lost when it comes to statistical
inference.  I am good at self-study.  I happily spend 12 hours a day reading
dry technical manuals.

About the research:

I have designed a web-based questionaire.  http://shared.openheartlogic.org
My collaborator (equally stats inept) is working on a similar web-based
questionaire http://ruminate.openheartlogic.org

Ultimately, we want to publish in a peer-reviewed journal such as Emotion &
Cognition or, at least, get a paper accepted at the annual Cognitive Science
conference.  Something like that.  We have already started collecting data but
not on a large scale since we are not confident about our statistical
approach.

This is a shot in the dark, but if a stats expert wants to collaborate with us
then we would welcome that. We don't have much to offer except, what we think
is, exciting research.

In any case, a few textbook recommendations would probably help me a lot.
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I was in a similar situation-I recommend (Crawley 2005) which I found to be
quite inspiring with many excellent examples.
http://www.wiley.com/WileyCDA/WileyTitle/productCd-0470022981.html  

Crawley, M. J. 2005. Statistics: An introduction using R. John Wiley & Sons
Ltd., Chichester, England.






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#
Everybody, thanks for your suggestions.  I am planning to order at least these
two:

  Peter Dalgaard _Introductory Statistics with R_
  Andrew Gelman _Bayesian Data Analysis_

Also, while stumbling around amazon.com, I found this book:

  Statistical Reasoning in Psychology and Education, 4th edition
  by Edward W. Minium, Bruce M. King  ISBN: 0471211877

This book looks perfect for me -- I can do math, learn R, etc, but WHY?  Why
use one method and not another?  Why structure a problem one way and not
another?  These are the questions which really stump me.

So, has anybody read this book?  Is there a similar book which is even better?