Statistics materials - Department of Experimental Psychology, University of Cambridge

This page serves two interrelated purposes. It provides on-line materials in support of statistics taught in the Department of Experimental Psychology in the University of Cambridge, and it provides materials in support of two books:

Aitken MRF, Cardinal RN (2006, in preparation). Statistics for the behavioural sciences student. Lawrence Erlbaum Associates, New Jersey, USA.
Cardinal RN, Aitken MRF (2006). ANOVA for the behavioural sciences researcher. Lawrence Erlbaum Associates, New Jersey, USA (ISBNs 0805855858, hardback; 0805855866, paperback).
- Errata for this book.
- Web links for this book.
- Google Books preview, with links to the publisher's web site and places to buy it.

Within the University of Cambridge, see

Teaching materials from the Department of Experimental Psychology (local access only),
Rudolf Cardinal's psychology, neuroscience, and statistics teaching materials for undergraduate and graduate students within the University of Cambridge,
Rudolf Cardinal's other publications,
Rudolf Cardinal's home page,
Mike Aitken's statistics materials,
Mike Aitken's home page,
NST IA Elementary Maths for Biologists course information.
The University Statistics Clinic, and its links.
Our tips for using R.

Relevant external links to statistics teaching materials and on-line books include:

the excellent set of Statistics Notes in the British Medical Journal (see also Martin Bland's publications)
StatSoft's Electronic Statistics Textbook (rather hard going for the novice).
Tangren J (2002) A Field Guide To Experimental Designs covers agricultural statistical designs, which have more relevance to the behavioural sciences than might be obvious at first glance.
Of historical interest: the University of York History of Statistics page, including links to original works by early statisticians (including de Moivre, Bayes, Pearson, Gossett, and Fisher).
Discussions sites, including Statistical Analysis (StackExchange).

More general mathematical sites include:

Commercial statistical, mathematical, and graphic software includes

SPSS -- statistical analysis. Recommended. Originally the name stood for Statistical Program for the Social Sciences.
SYSTAT -- statistical analysis.
SigmaStat -- statistical "advisory" software from Systat.
SigmaPlot -- technical graphing software from Systat. Recommended.
S-Plus -- statistical analysis. Note that this is closely related to S, which in turn is closely related to R (see below).
BMDP -- statistical analysis.
SAS -- statistical analysis.
Statistica -- statistical analysis.
GenStat -- statistical analysis. Originally from the Rothamsted agricultural research centre that developed many statistical techniques.
Mathematica -- symbolic mathematics. Recommended.
Matlab -- numerical and technical computation.
MathType -- equation editing tool.

Open-source and otherwise free-to-use software includes

StatLib archive of information and software.
The R project. Statistical analysis and graphing.
- R operates from a command-line interface (which may be intimidating), but there are also graphical user interfaces (GUIs) for R to make life easier, including The R Commander , SciViews-R , JGR , and RKWard .
- J.J. Faraway's (2002) excellent book Practical Regression and Anova in R (also here), free for personal use, describes how to perform ANOVA and other statistical techniques using R.
- Note that R is closely related to the language S, which is closely related to S-Plus (see above).
PSPP, an (as yet incomplete) free replacement for SPSS that can read SPSS data/syntax files.
GNUplot. Graphing.
GNU Octave. Numerical and technical computation, with statistical tests, largely compatible with Matlab. The Octave Repository contains more resources.
Maxima, for symbolic mathematics.
OpenOffice contains a spreadsheet program (Calc) that contains some statistical functions.

Power calculation:

Key: Windows, Macintosh, UNIX/Linux; Javascript for web browsers; MS-DOS or Windows command line.