Statistical Computing Software Reviews

This department includes the two sections New Developments in Statistical Computing and Statistical Computing Software Reviews; suitable contents for each of these sections is described under the respective section heading. Articles submitted for the department, outside the two sections, should not be highly technical and should be relevant to the teaching or practice of statistical computing.

This section is similar in organization to a Book Review section in other journals; however, software of interest to statisticians is the subject of review here. Emphasis is on software for microcomputers. Programs that operate only in larger mainframe computers will seldom receive review. Normally, producers of programs make a copy of their product available to the Section Editor, who then selects one or more persons to test the product and prepare a review.

Producers of computer software who wish to have their product reviewed are invited to contact the Section Editor, Professor Kenneth Berk, Department of Mathematics, 313 Stevenson Hall, Illinois State University, Normal, IL 61761.

Findings and opinions expressed in every review are solely those of the author. They should not be construed as reflecting endorsement of the product, or opinions held, by the American Statistical Association, nor is any warranty implied about any product reviewed.

SYSTAT Leland Wilkinson. Available from Systat, Inc., 603 Main St., Evanston, IL 60202. $495 (multiple copy and site fees available). Reviewed by Mark I. Scherwish

AIDA, Version 9/82 David A. Lingwood, Available from Action-Research Northwest, 11442 Marine View Drive, S.W., Seattle, WA 98146. $235. Reviewed by Walter Liggett

MSUSTAT, MS/PC-DOS and CP/M-80 Version 2.20 Richard E. Lund. Available from Research and Development, Inc., Montana State University, Bozeman, MT 59717–0002. $187.50 (university and multiple-copy discounts available). Reviewed by Mervyn G. Marasinghe     

Teaching Statistical Consulting Before Statistical Methodology

This paper outlines and discusses the advantages of an ‘Introduction to Statistical Consulting’ course (ISC) that exposes students to statistical consulting early in their studies. The course is intended for students before, or while, they study their units in statistical techniques, and assumes only a first‐year introductory statistics unit. The course exposes undergraduate students to the application of statistics and helps develop statistical thinking. An important goal is to introduce students to work as a statistician early in their studies because this motivates some students to study statistics further and provides a framework to motivate the learning of further statistical techniques. The ISC has proved popular with students, and this paper discusses the reasons for this popularity and the benefits of an ISC to statistical education and the statistics profession.     

Teaching Introductory Statistics Courses So That Nonstatisticians Experience Statistical Reasoning

The most critical point in developing dynamic introductory statistics courses for nonstatisticians is deciding whether to teach statistical reasoning (concepts and thinking), statistical methods (computations), or both. Statistical reasoning should precede statistical methods. Workshop-based courses effectively provide situated learning and an intimate teaching environment. Use real (or realistic) data, graphics, and teach exploratory data analysis before classical methods. Evaluate the students' levels of statistical anxiety prior to and during the course.     

Eminent Victorians and early statistical societies

The Victorians who founded statistical societies had a passion for facts and a concern for the poor. They were a varied bunch: novelists, the inventor of the computer, a predictor of population catastrophe and a philosopher who had his own corpse preserved and put on public display. In the Royal Statistical Society's 175th anniversary year Eileen Magnello looks at the characters who helped to form it.     

Statistical Monitoring of Nominal Logistic Profiles in Phase II

Statistical analysis of profile monitoring, a relatively new sub-area of statistical process control due to its applications in different industries, have urged researchers and practitioners to contribute to the developments of new monitoring methods. A statistical profile is a relationship between a quality characteristic (a response) and one or more independent variables to characterize quality of a process or a product. In this article, statistical profiles based on nominal responses are studied, where logistic regression is used to model the responses. Three approaches including likelihood ratio test (LRT), multivariate exponentially weighted moving average (MEWMA), and support vector machines (SVM) approaches are proposed to monitor quality of a process or product in Phase II. Performances of the proposed approaches are evaluated and compared using a case study. Moreover, the effect of two important factors on average run length (ARL) performance, number of levels and number of covariates, has been considered. Results indicate that performance of all approaches depends on the number of covariates and levels. As the number of these factors increases, SVM performance improves while performance of the other approaches deteriorates.     

Inferences on the lognormal mean for complete samples

In many engineering problems it is necessary to draw statistical inferences on the mean of a lognormal distribution based on a complete sample of observations. Statistical demonstration of mean time to repair (MTTR) is one example. Although optimum confidence intervals and hypothesis tests for the lognormal mean have been developed, they are difficult to use, requiring extensive tables and/or a computer. In this paper, simplified conservative methods for calculating confidence intervals or hypothesis tests for the lognormal mean are presented. In this paper, “conservative” refers to confidence intervals (hypothesis tests) whose infimum coverage probability (supremum probability of rejecting the null hypothesis taken over parameter values under the null hypothesis) equals the nominal level. The term “conservative” has obvious implications to confidence intervals (they are “wider” in some sense than their optimum or exact counterparts). Applying the term “conservative” to hypothesis tests should not be confusing if it is remembered that this implies that their equivalent confidence intervals are conservative. No implication of optimality is intended for these conservative procedures. It is emphasized that these are direct statistical inference methods for the lognormal mean, as opposed to the already well-known methods for the parameters of the underlying normal distribution. The method currently employed in MIL-STD-471A for statistical demonstration of MTTR is analyzed and compared to the new method in terms of asymptotic relative efficiency. The new methods are also compared to the optimum methods derived by Land (1971, 1973).     

统计功效与分析软件

一、背景的说明统计功效（ＳｔａｔｉｓｔｉｃａｌＰｏｗｅｒ）是统计学中的一个重要概念,也是一个十分有用的测度指标。国外的许多教科书中对统计功效有过比较详细的讨论,国内出版的教科书中对此也有涉及（参见：袁卫等编著《新编统计学教程》,经济科学出版社,１９９９年２月）。简单地说,统计功效是指,在假设检验中,拒绝原假设后,接受正确的替换假设的概率。我们知道,在假设检验中有α错误和β错误。α错误是弃真错误,β错误是取伪错误。取伪错误是指,拒绝原假设后,接受错误的替换假设的概率。由此可知,统计功效等于１－β。…     

Statistical review by research ethics committees

This paper discusses some of the issues surrounding statistical review by research ethics committees (RECs). A survey of local RECs in 1997 revealed that only 27/184 (15%) included a statistician member at that time, although 70/175 (40%) recognized the need for such. The role of the statistician member is considered and the paper includes a summary of a meeting of the Royal Statistical Society to discuss statistical issues that frequently arise in the review of REC applications. A list of minimum qualifications which RECs should expect from anyone claiming to be a statistician would be useful, together with a list of statisticians who are well qualified and willing to serve on RECs, and a list of training courses for REC members covering the appropriate statistical issues.     

Who Will Celebrate Our 200th Anniversary? Growing the Next Generation of ASA Members

During the next 25 years, the growth and vitality of the American Statistical Association will depend on how well we attract and serve members in emerging areas of practice such as data science, where statistics as a skill set is in high demand but statistics as a profession has low recognition. Successful adaptation to the era of Big Data requires that we broaden our understanding of statistical practice to include the work of all those who learn from data. In order to grow the next generation of members, we must also retain a much higher proportion of today's student members, many of whom leave the ASA upon graduation. By providing value that meets the needs of these groups and equips them to flourish in their organizations, we can become the Big Tent for Statistics.     

A Graphical Display of Large Correlation Matrices

This department includes the two sections New Development in Statistical Computing and Statistical Computing Software Reviews; suitable contents for each of these sections are described under the respective section heading. Articles submitted for the department, outside the two sections, should not be highly technical and should be relevant to the teaching or practice of statistical computing.

Large correlation matrices are hard to look at. In this article we present correlations as elliptical glyphs for a simple intuitive display of large matrices.     

The american statistical association's response to the challenges of improving quality

The American Statistical. Association recently created a Comittee on Quality and Productivity This committee has beguna large number of activities that will bed escribed in this talk. Inaddition, the American Statistical Association hasunde taken alarge -scale project on Quantitatve Literacy that will also be described in this talk. Finally, some challenges in educating thegeneral publicin statistical reasoning will be discussed.     

新中国政府统计调查制度的建立、发展和改革六十年

统计调查制度是统计工作的基础和规范。目前我国已建立起一个庞大的统计调查制度体系,从内容上讲,包括国民经济核算体系、统计指标体系、统计标准体系、统计调查方法体系和统计调查制度管理体系。文章首先就新中国政府统计成立60年以来我国上述五个体系的建立和发展历程进行了回顾和梳理,然后就我国政府统计调查制度的主要特点及推行中获得的有益经验进行了总结,最后指出现行统计调查制度中存在的主要问题和改革的方向。     

Query languages for statistical databases

Statistical database management systems keep raw, elementary and/or aggregated data and include query languages with facilities to calculate various statistics from this data. In this article we examine statistical database query languages with respect to the criteria identified and taxonomy developed in Ozsoyoglu and Ozsoyoglu (1985b). The criteria include statistical metadata and objects, aggregation features and interface to statistical packages. The taxonomy of statistical database query languages classifies them with respect to the data model used, the type of user interface and method of implementation. Temporal databases are rich sources of data for statistical analysis. Aggregation features of temporal query languages, as well as the issues in calculating aggregates from temporal data, are also examined.     

Smoothed empirical likelihood confidence intervals for the relative distribution with left‐truncated and right‐censored data

The study of differences among groups is an interesting statistical topic in many applied fields. It is very common in this context to have data that are subject to mechanisms of loss of information, such as censoring and truncation. In the setting of a two‐sample problem with data subject to left truncation and right censoring, we develop an empirical likelihood method to do inference for the relative distribution. We obtain a nonparametric generalization of Wilks' theorem and construct nonparametric pointwise confidence intervals for the relative distribution. Finally, we analyse the coverage probability and length of these confidence intervals through a simulation study and illustrate their use with a real data set on gastric cancer. The Canadian Journal of Statistics 38: 453–473; 2010 © 2010 Statistical Society of Canada     

《统计研究》的历史阶段性回顾与特征分析

本文基于各个时代背景下我国统计学科的重要事件,联系过去十四届中青年统计科学研讨会的会议主题,利用文本数据挖掘技术,对1984年至2014年第5期《统计研究》刊登的5192篇文章的篇名、关键词和摘要等做深入分析。探讨了我国30年来统计学科的发展历程,剖析了《统计研究》期刊的整体特征,进一步明确了《统计研究》杂志对中国统计学科建设发展的重要贡献。     

Statistical Computing Software Reviews

This section is similar in organization to a Book Review section in other journals; however, software of interest to statisticians is the subject of review here. Emphasis is on software for microcomputers. Programs that operate only in larger mainframe computers will seldom receive review. Normally, producers of programs make a copy of their product available to the Section Editor, who then selects one or more persons to test the product and prepare a review.

Producers of computer software who wish to have their product reviewed are invited to contact the Section Editor, Professor Kenneth Berk, Department of Mathematics, 313 Stevenson Hall, Illinois State University, Normal, IL 61761.

Findings and opinions expressed in every review are solely those of the author. They should not be construed as reflecting endorsement of the product, or opinions held, by the American Statistical Association, nor is any warranty implied about any product reviewed.

STAN, Version II.0. David M. Allen. Available from Statistical Consultants, Inc., 462 E. High Street, Lexington, KY 40508. $300. Reviewed by Peter A. Lachenbruch     

On Testing Equality of Distributions of Technical Efficiency Scores

The challenge of the econometric problem in production efficiency analysis is that the efficiency scores to be analyzed are unobserved. Statistical properties have recently been discovered for a type of estimator popular in the literature, known as data envelopment analysis (DEA). This opens up a wide range of possibilities for well-grounded statistical inference about the true efficiency scores from their DEA estimates. In this paper we investigate the possibility of using existing tests for the equality of two distributions in such a context. Considering the statistical complications pertinent to our context, we consider several approaches to adapting the Li test to the context and explore their performance in terms of the size and power of the test in various Monte Carlo experiments. One of these approaches shows good performance for both the size and the power of the test, thus encouraging its use in empirical studies. We also present an empirical illustration analyzing the efficiency distributions of countries in the world, following up a recent study by Kumar and Russell (2002), and report very interesting results.     

Remote access systems for statistical analysis of microdata

Statistical Agencies manage huge amounts of microdata. The main task of these agencies is to provide a variety of users with general information about for instance the population and the economy. However, in some cases users request additional, more specific information. Many agencies have therefore set up facilities that enable selected users to obtain tailor-made statistical information.A remote access system is an example of such a facility where users can submit queries for statistical information from their own computer. These queries are handled by the statistical agency and the generated, possibly confidentialised, output is returned to the user. This way the agency still keeps control over its own data while the user does not need to make frequent visits to the agency.For some years, the Luxembourg Income Study (LIS) and Luxembourg Employment Study (LES) have made use of an advanced remote access system. At Statistics Netherlands and at other statistical institutes recently the need for a similar system has been expressed. In this article, we discuss the characteristics, limitations and desired properties of a remote access system. We illustrate the discussion by the system used at LIS/LES.     

What Your Future Doctor Should Know About Statistics: Must-Include Topics for Introductory Undergraduate Biostatistics

The increased emphasis on evidence-based medicine creates a greater need for educating future physicians in the general domain of quantitative reasoning, probability, and statistics. Reflecting this trend, more medical schools now require applicants to have taken an undergraduate course in introductory statistics. Given the breadth of statistical applications, we should cover in that course certain essential topics that may not be covered in the more general introductory statistics course. In selecting and presenting such topics, we should bear in mind that doctors also need to communicate probabilistic concepts of risks and benefits to patients who are increasingly expected to be active participants in their own health care choices despite having no training in medicine or statistics. It is also important that interesting and relevant examples accompany the presentation, because the examples (rather than the details) are what students tend to retain years later. Here, we present a list of topics we cover in the introductory biostatistics course that may not be covered in the general introductory course. We also provide some of our favorite examples for discussing these topics.