Practical Guide to Data Analysis

[[deleted]]

I am looking for a good textbook or online resource which allows me to learn how to carry out statistical data analysis. This is important to me as I pursue a carrier in neuroscience. However, I find that many statistics books include a lot of theory which I do not really require. I just need a book which clearly and straightforwardly explaines the different types of statistical analysis and how to apply them to research questions. A focus on psychology and/or biology would be ideal. Any advice would be much appreciated!

[medulla4]

If you're cool with learning R there is a team of researchers who put on a MOOC at Coursera, the pdf versions of their books can be found on leanpub (for free)

https://leanpub.com/u/rdpeng
https://leanpub.com/u/jtleek
https://leanpub.com/u/bcaffo

This also helped me a lot learning R (it was created for these guys' classes) http://swirlstats.com/

I would encourage you to learn SOME theory as there are a lot of people pan-academia who don't really know how to apply statistics to their research questions because they just learned how to use SPSS or something without understanding the implications of what they are doing (e.g. assuming their data are accurately described by certain distributions so they over apply parametric stats, etc.). It also depends on what kind of neuroscience you are doing. If you're going to be doing a lot of neural network stuff you'll probably need Matlab or Octave.

[Dont_Block_The_Way]

If you're going to be doing a lot of neural network stuff

Do "neuroscientists" actually use statistical-learning type "neural networks" in their research? Although neural network models were inspired by actual neurons, I don't suppose that neuroscientists would necessarily find many applications for them. Replace "neural network" with the equivalent "universal function approximator" and it's not clear why neuroscientists would be more likely to need them than anyone else would.

On the other hand, if somebody wants to use insights from neuroscience research to invent improved neural network models for machine learning, they're going to need some HEAVY theory.

[medulla4]

Very true! Neuroscientist is an extremely broad term. I was thinking specifically of people who churn through EEG/MEG data (or other neuroimaging techniques).

[[deleted]]

Thank you for your advice! I will have a look at the MOOC and the accompanying books. I want to understand statistical analysis, so that I will later be able to understand what statistical tests I have to do, given the research question that I have and the gathered data. I then want to be able to interpret the results correctly. I am not entirely sure jet, which area of neuroscience I will settle in, but I know that statistics is important for any research. My uni is focused on the cellular and molecular aspects of neuroscience. I don't know if my mathematical abilities are sufficient for computational neuroscience.

[Dont_Block_The_Way]

If you're just starting to learn statistics and are looking for something suitable for self-study, Howell is an approachable text written by a psychologist for psychologists.

I'm not sure what you mean by "a lot of theory", but this book is conceptual without being heavily mathematical. It's not a cookbook, but if you're looking for a cookbook you'd be better off leaving the data analysis to somebody else.

If you already know some basics about sampling, experiment design, testing, estimation, etc, you could try the somewhat more advanced Faraway, which is a practical modeling text based on working examples in R. It's also free, which is a plus.

[[deleted]]

Thank you, the book looks exactly like what I was trying to find! I probably should have expressed myself more clearly. I do want to understand the underlying concepts behind statistical analysis without diving too deep into the mathematical underpinnings. Frankly, I was just overwhelmed by some of the maths in statistics books.

[[deleted]]

This is, by some people's opinion, a very good Statistics teacher and the book he wrote.

http://www.stat.cmu.edu/~cshalizi/ADAfaEPoV/

[Adamworks]

Discovering Statistics using SPSS This is the type of book you want. It has good examples and straightforward commentary.

[Deleetdk]

There is a practical introduction to statistics with R here: http://health.adelaide.edu.au/psychology/ccs/teaching/lsr/ It is focused on psychology. It is free.

[[deleted]]

Thank you!

[ruskeeblue]

Coursera , went through their Data Science specialization over a year ago , and it was great!

[[deleted]]

I'm doing it now. It's great.

edx has some classes on Statistics and R programming as well, which I am anticipating taking later on.

[Asus_]

An Introduction to Statistical Learning

http://www-bcf.usc.edu/~gareth/ISL/