Statistics & Probability Links

"To call in the statistician after the experiment is done may be no more than asking him to perform a postmortem examination: he may be able to say what the experiment died of."
    - Sir Ronald Aylmer Fisher (1890-1962), Indian Statistical Congress, Sankhya, ca 1938.

Contents:
1.  General Resources
2.  Statistical Computing
3.  Statistics & Probability:  Some Cautions & Controversies
4.  Statistical Issues in Botany


  
General Resources
Lexicon of Statistical Modelling
Internet Statistical Resources
Oliver Schabenberger's statistical consulting page (excellent resources, especially for implementing analyses in SAS)
A New View of Statistics (Although I haven't yet had a chance too go through this site in detail, it appears to be an excellent wide-ranging discussion of statistical concepts)
Quantitative Methods for Resource Managers and Field Biologists (course notes:  nice overview of statistical methods and issues in field biology)

Statistical Computing
StatLib
UCLA statistical computing resources
S-Plus Help (my favorite statistics software)
SAS software
FloraMap (software for predicting plant distributions based upon climate data and known records)

Statistics and Probability:  Some Cautions and Controversies

 Hypothesis testing & p-values
1.  "The insignificance of statistical significance testing"
2.  Understanding P-values (good links)
3.  "P-values versus confidence intervals in statistical inference"
    (a word to the wise by Dr. Jason Hsu, from whom I was priviledged to take courses at the Ohio State University Department of Statistics)

Pseudoreplication
  1.  Pseudoreplication and subsampling
  2.  "Logic of  experiments in ecology:  Is pseudoreplication a pseudoissue?" by L. Oksanen (published in Oikos 94(1):27-38)
  3.  "Pseudoreplication: a sine qua non for regional ecology" by W.H. Hargrove and J. Pickering

Advantages of fitting a statistical model to one's data rather than visa versa:
"Some statistical problems associated with biological assessment - implications and solutions"
        (an example of using the negative binomial distribution to model biological survey count data)

Schools of thought in statistics and probability (Frequentism, Likelihood, objective Bayesiansism, and subjective Bayesianism)
1.  The Nature of Scientific Evidence
2.  "Could Fisher, Jeffreys, and Neyman have agreed on testing?"(by Dr. James O. Berger, Duke University)
3.  "Facts versus Factions:  The use and abuse of subjectivity in scientific research"  (by Robert Matthews.  Provides an subjective Bayesian perspective and a very interesting discussion of subjectivity in science)
4.  Probability theory as extended logic (very interesting and thought-provoking site; provides an objective Bayesian perspective)
5.  "Resurrecting logical probability"(Related to the previous link.  by Dr. James Franklin, University of New South Wales, Australia)
6.  "Beyond the significance test controversy:  Prime time for Bayes?"
7.  Why Likelihood? (Likelihood school perspective on statistical evidence.)


Statistical Issues in Botany
"Deconstructing Reconstruction: When are the results of parsimony and statistical phylogenetic analysis genuine advances?" (A very interesting and cautionary talk by Dr. Richard Zander on the serious problems associationed with current methods of phylogenetic tree estimation)

If you have any comments or questions, please contact the author, Chad Husby ( chad.husby@fiu.edu or husby.1@osu.edu )

© Chad E. Husby 2002

Last updated October 16, 2002

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