[Heartlogic-dev] remedial stats education

[Joshua N Pritikin]

In short:

I didn't take enough stats courses in college.  Now I am working on scientific
research and I feel somewhat lost when it comes to designing the statistical
framework.  I have looked through the books at:

  http://www.r-project.org/doc/bib/R-books.html

I even tried to read [17] Julian J. Faraway. Linear Models with R.  This book
is too advanced.  It helped a little bit but I still feel lost.  Can somebody
recommend a textbook or textbooks suitable for a self-study stats course?

Brief bio:

I have 20 years background in software development.  I know lots of
computer languages including C++ and Perl.  The computer language aspects of R
seems fairly simple.  I did some calculus in college but not more than 1-2
courses.  I have a basic understanding of probability.  I mostly understand
descriptive statistics.  I feel somewhat lost when it comes to statistical
inference.  I am good at self-study.  I happily spend 12 hours a day reading
dry technical manuals.

About the research:

I have designed a web-based questionaire.  http://shared.openheartlogic.org
My collaborator (equally stats inept) is working on a similar web-based
questionaire http://ruminate.openheartlogic.org

Ultimately, we want to publish in a peer-reviewed journal such as Emotion &
Cognition or, at least, get a paper accepted at the annual Cognitive Science
conference.  Something like that.  We have already started collecting data but
not on a large scale since we are not confident about our statistical
approach.

This is a shot in the dark, but if a stats expert wants to collaborate with us
then we would welcome that. We don't have much to offer except, what we think
is, exciting research.

In any case, a few textbook recommendations would probably help me a lot.

-- 
Make April 15 just another day, visit http://fairtax.org

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