Intimidation...

I'll be honest. I'm a bit scared to be writing a blog about statistics that the whole world can see. The typical image of a statistician is of an egghead that spouts off numbers, equations, and conclusions in an erudite and authoritarian way that easily intimidates the audience. I don't think I can do that facilely...yet. I understand the equations in my textbooks but explaining them does not role off my tongue easily.

But more than that, I don't want to walk in the land of intimidation. Statistics and the insights that statistics offer shouldn't intimidate. They should inform and they should inform in a helpful manner. Certainly, detailed explanations using Greek letters and equations are needed to establish the legitimacy of any given statistical method. Yet, the vast majority of people who could be interested in what statistical insight can offer are more interested in the fact that two groups of people show different interests or activity rather than knowing that the discriminant analysis or logistic regression has produced a significant Mahalanobis distance or log odds ratio.

What is more important is that interested parties know that you looked at the differences between two groups and that you can be reasonably certain those two groups respond differently to the advertisement or treatment. Knowing that the difference is "real" enables more confident and effective decisions. Such reassurance goes a lot further than intimidation ever will.

Wandering

I have taken a wandering route to this point of my statistical education. Math was a favorite subject through most of elementary and secondary school. I was selected as the most outstanding math student in my high school my senior year. I then proceeded to attend college taking only the one statistics course required to attain my major in psychology. Yet two years after graduating, I felt the itch to give some college math courses a try. I dipped my toe in the college level work with a calculus for business majors course. I enjoyed it and did not find it especially difficult. So I moved on to "full blown" calculus. That was slightly more challenging but not at all the monumental challenge it is often portrayed to be. Two more semesters of calculus followed accompanied by linear algebra, discrete methods, ordinary differential equations, and probability. I finally hit a speed bump when I took the real analysis class. That one just didn't click.

I wish I had known sooner just what statistical methods had to offer. But that's not entirely fair to myself. Part of my statistical education has been learning just how recent many statistical methods are. Even for methods that have been mathematically known for quite some time, only the recent advances in computer processing power and storage capacity have made them feasible to use. Even with the millions of transactions a second that computers can now achieve, even on the desktop, my binary analysis class was still  warned that the logistic regression that we were to perform could possibly take days to complete. Of course, the storage capacity has made it possible to have a class dataset with 1,255,429 records (I may remember this number for quite some time given the many times I've recently checked to ensure I did not loose any of those records) and over 300 variables to be analyzed. 

Now hear this.

Beginning now, I will start posting thoughts about statistics. Towards that end, and at the risk or being a tad too clever, I have chosen “stat” as part of this blog’s name. Despite the risk of excessive cleverness, I chose the name to convey both the immediacy of these postings. This is what I am doing now. But I do many things. So the name also points this blog at my current involvement with statistics. 

In May of this year (2013), I acquired a Master of Science in Applied Statistics degree from Kennesaw State University (Kennesaw, GA).  Attaining this degree has launched me into yet another phase of my life. I look forward to new challenges, new rewards, and new job satisfaction. This blog will share the journey with whomsoever desires to tag along.