No label defined (Q5711201)

This monograph introduces on a total of 284 pages basic statistical methods relevant for analysis of biological data. The book is organized in 12 chapters and 2 appendices and is designed for undergraduate students in biosciences. Chapter 1 emphasizes the importance of the use of statistical methods in biosciences. Key concepts such as samples, relatedness of samples, the different scales of data and basic mathematical notations are presented in chapter 2. Chapter 3 describes standard statistics on location and variability, frequency distributions (histograms, normal distributions) as well as methods for visualisation (pies, boxes and errorplots). An overview of inferential statistics is given in chapter 4. In particular, estimation techniques like calculation of standard errors and confidence intervals and their graphical presentations are considered. The next eight chapters are devoted to statistical hypothesis testing. Chapter 5 deals with general issues relating to hypothesis testing, introducing null hypotheses, significance levels, errors (type I and II), parametric versus nonparametric tests and test tails (one or two). As tests dealing with frequency data, one- and two-way chi-square tests are presented in chapter 6. Parametric and nonparametric tests of differences are covered in the following three situations: two unrelated samples (t-test and Mann-Whitney U test in chapter 7), two related samples (paired t-test and Wilcoxon signed-rank test in chapter 8) and more than two unrelated samples (one-way ANOVA and Kruskal-Wallis ANOVA in chapter 9). As tests of relationships linear regression (chapter 10) and correlation (Pearson test and Spearman test in chapter 11) are treated. Chapter 12 concentrates on the choice between the different test procedures and graphical presentations. It provides a flow chart diagram for selecting the appropriate statistical test procedures in different sample and data situations and gives some advice for the right use of graphical methods. The volume ends with the answers to self-help questions and two appendices containing an introduction to data entry in SPSS and statistical tables of critical values. In summary, the textbook under review is an excellent introduction to basic statistical methods. It offers numerous self-help questions in each chapter, step-by step worked examples of all presented statistical methods (by hand and using the statistical package SPSS) and additional literature web links and is therefore perfectly suited for private study.