14 Basic Statistics (Using R)

You ever hear the joke that a data scientist is someone who knows more computer science than a statistician and more statistics than a data scientist? (I never said it was a good joke.)
— Joel Gruss

14.1 Purpose of the Unit

This isn’t a statistics book. However, R is a statistical computing language, and many of the functions built into R are designed for statistical purposes. As such, we’re going to very quickly go over some statistical terms and a few of the statistical functions built into R. That way, you’ll have a better understanding of what exactly it is that we’re doing in later chapters.

14.2 Definitions

14.2.1 Data Concepts

We’ve already discussed some data concepts in this course, such as the ideas of rectangular and tidy data. However, those discussions are buried in the text of the last chapter, so are hard to refer to - and I want to make sure these concepts are all contained in the same place, for a clean reference section.

Vector

Sequence of data elements of the same type

Each element of the vector are also called components, members, or values

Created in R using c()

Dataframe

A list of vectors of identical lengths

Example: iris

Variable

A trait or condition that can exist in different quantities or types

We measure the impacts of independent predictor variables on dependent response variables

Continuous Data

Numeric data which is not restricted to certain values - there are an infinite number of possible values

Discrete Data

Numeric data which is restricted to certain values - for example, number of kids (or trees, or animals) has to be a whole integer

Categorical Data

Data which can only exist as one of a specific set of values - for example, house color or zip code

Binned numeric data (e.g. “between 1 and 2 inches”) is typically categorical

Binary Data

Categorical data where the only values are 0 and 1

Often used in situations where a “hit” - an animal getting trapped, a customer clicking a link, etc - is a 1, and no hit is a 0

Ordinal Data

A type of categorical data where each value is assigned a level or rank

Useful with binned data, but also in graphing to rearrange the order categories are drawn

Referred to in R as “factors”

Unstructured Data

Data without a strict format, typically composed of text

R used to deal with unstructured data by converting it to factors; while this isn’t necessary anymore, some functions still require text data to be in factor form

Data Distribution

How often every possible value occurs in a dataset

Usually shown as a curved line on a graph, or a histogram

Normal Distribution

Data where mean = median, 2/3 of the data are within one standard deviation of the mean, 95% of the data are within two SD and 97% are within 3.

Many statistical analyses assume your data are normally distributed

Many datasets - especially in nature - aren’t

Skewed Distribution

Data where the median does not equal the mean

A left-skewed distribution has a long tail on the left side of the graph, while a right-skewed distribution has a long tail to the right

Named after the tail and not the peak of the graph, as values in that tail occur more often than would be expected with a normal distribution

14.2.2 Statistical Terms

Estimate

A statistic calculated from your data

Called an estimate as we are approximating population-level values from sample data

Synonynm: metric

Hypothesis Testing

Comparing the null hypothesis (typically, that two quantities are equivalent) to an alternative hypothesis

The alternative hypothesis in a two-tailed test is that the quantities are different, while the alternative hypothesis in a one-tailed test is that one quantity is larger or smaller than the other

Almost never used in business, as the important question is usually not does x cause y but can x predict y

p Value:

The probability of seeing an effect of the same size as our results given a random model

High p values often mean your independent variables are irrelevant, but low p values don’t mean they’re important - that judgement requires a rational justification, and examining the effect size and importance. Otherwise you’re just equating correlation and causation.

The 0.05 thing is from a single sentence, taken out of context, from a book published in 1925. There’s no reason to set a line in the sand for “significance” - 0.05 means that there’s a 1 in 20 probability your result could be random chance, and 0.056 means it’s 1 in 18. Those are almost identical odds.

Some journals have banned their use altogether, but others still will only accept “significant” results

Statement from the American Statistical Association:

A p value, or statistical significance, does not measure the size of an effect or the importance of a result. By itself, a p value does not provide a good measure of evidence about a model or a hypothesis.

“Robust”

A term meaning an estimate is less susceptible to outliers

Means are not robust, while medians are, for instance.

Regression

A method to analyze the impacts of independent variables on a dependent variable

ANOVA and models are both types of regression analyses

General Linear Model

Formulas representing the expected value of a response variable for given values of one or more predictors

The typical y = mx + b format of model

Sometimes abbreviated GLM; R uses lm() to construct these

Generalized Linear Model

Depending who you ask, these may or may not be linear models - they tweak the normal formula in one way or another to measure outcomes that general linear models can’t address

In this course, we’ll only be using logistic models

Sometimes abbreviated GLM; R uses glm() to construct these

14.2.2.1 Estimates and Statistics

n

The number of observations of a dataset or level of a categorical.

In R, run nrow(dataframe) or length(Vector) to calculate.

To calculate by group, run count(Data, GroupingVariable)

Examples: nrow(iris), length(iris$Sepal.Length), count(iris, Species)

Mean

The average of a dataset, defined as the sum of all observations divided by the number of observations.

In R, run mean(Vector) to calculate.

Example: mean(iris$Sepal.Length)

Trimmed Mean

The mean of a dataset with a certain proportion of data not included

The highest and lowest values are trimmed - for instance, the 10% trimmed mean will use the middle 80% of your data

mean(Vector, trim = 0.##)

mean(iris$Sepal.Length, trim = 0.10)

Variance

A measure of the spread of your data.

var(Vector)

var(iris$Sepal.Length)

Standard Deviation

The amount any observation can be expected to differ from the mean.

sd(Vector)

sd(iris$Sepal.Length)

Standard Error

The error associated with a point estimate (e.g. the mean) of the sample.

If you’re reporting the mean of a sample variable, use the SD. If you’re putting error bars around means on a graph, use the SE.

No native function in R - run sd(Vector)/sqrt(length(Vector)) to calculate.

sd(iris$Sepal.Length)/sqrt(length(iris$Sepal.Length))

Median Absolute Deviation from the Median

Average distance between each datapoint and - in R - the median

A measure of spread in your data

Note that MAD often means mean absolute deviation from the mean, mean absolute deviation from the median, and a few other less common things - check your acronyms before using!

mad(Vector)

mad(iris$Sepal.Length)

Median

A robust estimate of the center of the data.

median(Vector)

median(iris$Sepal.Length)

Minimum

The smallest value.

min(Vector)

min(iris$Sepal.Length)

Maximum

The largest value.

max(Vector)

max(iris$Sepal.Length)

Range

The maximum minus the minimum.

max(Vector) - min(Vector)

max(iris$Sepal.Length) - min(iris$Sepal.Length)

Quantile

The n quantile is the value at which, for a given vector, n percent of the data is below that value.

Ranges from 0-1. Quantile * 100 = percentile.

Quartiles are the 0.25, 0.5, and 0.75 quantiles

quantile(Vector, c(quantiles that you want))

quantile(iris$Sepal.Length, c(0.25, 0.5, 0.75))

Interquartile Range

The middle 50% of the data, contained between the 0.25 and 0.75 quantiles

IQR(Vector)

IQR(iris$Sepal.Length)

Skew

The relative position of the mean and median. At 0, mean = median, and the data is normally distributed.

Not included in base R.

Kurtosis

The size of the tails in a distribution. In R, values much different from 0 are non-normally distributed.

Not included in base R.

14.2.3 Models and Tests

Note that most tests discussed here default to a 95% confidence level and a two-tailed test. If you want to learn how to change those for any function, type ?FunctionName(). Functions not applicable to the iris() dataset do not currently have examples underneath them.

Correlation

How closely related two variables are

Pearson’s test assumes your data is normally distributed and measures linear correlation

Spearman’s test does not assume normality and measures non-linear correlation

Kendall’s test also does not assume normality and measures non-linear correlation, and is a more robust test - but it is harder to compute by hand, and as such is less commonly seen

You cannot compare results from one type of test to another - Kendall’s results are always 20-40% lower than Spearman’s, for instance

cor(Vector1, Vector2) provides correlation coefficients, while cor.test(Vector1, Vector2) performs the statistical test, giving test statistics, p values, and other outputs. Both perform the Pearson test by default, but can be changed by providing the argument method = "spearman" or method = "kendall"

cor(iris$Sepal.Length, iris$Sepal.Width, method = "pearson")

cor.test(iris$Sepal.Length, iris$Sepal.Width, method = "pearson")

t Test

A method of comparing the means of two groups

If your group variable has more than two levels, don’t use a t test - use an ANOVA instead

t.test(Vector1, Vector2)

Chi-squared Test

A test to see if two categorical variables are related

The null hypothesis is that both variables are independent from one another

For more information - particularly on what form your data should be in - please see this site.

chisq.test(Vector1, Vector2)

Linear Models

A type of regression which predicts the value of a response variable at given values of independent predictor variables

If you need help understanding linear models, here’s a lecture from Penn State.

The most important thing for our purposes is understanding that models are made up of terms, which are the predictor variables you give it, and coefficients, which are multiplied by those terms to calculate the value of our response.

Larger coefficients generally mean that variable is more important than others in the model, but only if the variables share units - one (much argued-over) way to compare coefficients between variables with different units is discussed here

Linear models also include an intercept term, which isn’t multiplied with any variable. This term being “significant” at p = whatever means literally nothing, and if it’s your only significant term, your model is useless.

You can add multiple predictor vectors using +, and include interaction terms using + Vector1:Vector2.

lm(ResponseVector ~ PredictorVectors, data)

lm(Sepal.Length ~ Species, data = iris)

Logistic Models

A form of generalized linear model where the predictor variable is a binary vector

Extremely common in science and business to predict events - if a tree or animal will die, if a sale will be made, etc

glm(ResponseVector ~ PredictorVectors, data, family = "binomial")

ANOVA

A test to identify the impacts of one or more categorical variables on one or more numeric response variables

An altered form of the linear model

This blog post does an interesting treatment on how to interpret ANOVA results with significant interactions

anova(lm(ResponseVector ~ PredictorVectors, data))

Normally, you’ll save your model to an object using <-, then run anova() on that object - so model <- lm(Sepal.Length ~ Species, data = iris), then anova(model) - though nesting your functions as above returns the same result

14.2.4 How We’ll Compare Models

There are plenty of different ways to compare models, each with their own proponents and detractors. Rather than wade into those arguments, we’re going to use three of the most common metrics. Other metrics (RMSE, PRESS, BIC, etc) can also be generated from R’s modeling functions, but we won’t go into depth on those.

R²

The percentage of variance in your data explained by your regression

The more independent predictor variables in a model, the higher the R², all else being equal

The adjusted R² is a better estimate of regression goodness-of-fit, as it adjusts for the number of variables in a model

summary(lm(ResponseVector ~ PredictorVector, data))

model <- lm(Sepal.Length ~ Species, iris) then summary(model)

RMSE

Root-mean square error

Standard deviation of the residuals - so tells you how accurate your model is

Lower == better

Receiver Operating Characteristic Curve

R² isn’t applicable to logistic models

Instead, we calculate the area under the ROC curve, with the area under the curve being abbreviated AUC

AUC represents the accuracy of your model, with random guessing having an AUC of 0.5 and a perfect model having an AUC of 1

AUC is sometimes referred to as the c-statistic

AIC:

Akaike Information Criterion

For a single dataset, the model with the smallest AIC is your best model

But models with a $\Delta$AIC (the difference between their two AICs) of < 2 (or 4, depending who you ask) are statistically identical

If your model has a $\Delta$AIC of < 2 with the null model, it’s useless

Null model: lm(ResponseVariable ~ 1)

Cross Validation:

A method in which data is split into separate training and testing datasets, to evaluate the performance of the model on new data

The gold standard for examining model performance is for a model to be trained and tuned using the training datasets, then tested once and only once by generating predictions and calculating accuracy for the test dataset. You then report the statistics from this test.

A variation is k-fold cross validation, where the dataset is split into k sections. Models are then trained using every combination of k-1 sections (so if k = 3, three separate models would be trained on the combined 1st and 2nd, 2nd and 3rd, and 1st and 3rd datasets) and tested on the one section not included.

More information on cross validation and its implementation in R here

Confusion Matrices:

A table showing how often your model predicted an outcome correctly and how often it performed incorrectly

This provides both a sense of overall accuracy and how exactly the model is inaccurate - for instance, which category it’s most likely to misclassify

Provides a way of quantitatively and qualitatively comparing different model formulas

14.3 Exercises

All examples here use the Orange dataset, which is automatically included in R. Note that the O is capitalized!

Look at Orange using either head or as.tibble() (you’ll have to run library(tidyverse) for that second option). What type of data are each of the columns?
Find the mean, standard deviation, and standard error of tree circumference.
Make a linear model which describes circumference (the response) as a function of age (the predictor). Save it as an object with <-, then print the object out by typing its name. What do those coefficients mean?
Make another linear model describing age as a function of circumference. Save this as a different object.
Call summary() on both of your model objects. What do you notice?
Does this mean that trees growing makes them get older? Does a tree getting older make it grow larger? Or are these just correlations?
Does the significant p value prove that trees growing makes them get older? Why not?