All Features
Donald J. Wheeler
The computation for skewness does not fully describe everything that happens as a distribution becomes more skewed. Here we shall use some examples to visualize just what skewness does—and does not—involve.
The mean for a probability model describes the balance point. The standard deviation…
Tony Boobier
Does your use of probabilities confuse your audience? Sometimes even using numbers can be misleading. The notion of a 1-in-a-100-year flood doesn’t prevent the possibility of flooding occurring in consecutive years. This description is no more than a statistical device for explaining the likelihood…
Donald J. Wheeler
There are four major questions in statistics. These can be listed under the headings of description, probability, inference, and homogeneity. An appreciation of the relationships between these four areas is essential for successful data analysis. This column outlines these relationships and…
Donald J. Wheeler
The cumulative sum (or Cusum) technique is occasionally offered as an alternative to process behavior charts, even though they have completely different objectives. Process behavior charts characterize whether a process has been operated predictably. Cusums assume that the process is already being…
Donald J. Wheeler
Last month we found that capability and performance indexes have no inherent preference for one probability model over another. However, whenever we seek to convert these indexes into fractions of nonconforming product, we have to make use of some probability model. Here, we’ll look at the role…
Donald J. Wheeler
Many people have been taught that capability indexes only apply to “normally distributed data.” This article will consider the various components of this idea to shed some light on what has, all too often, been based on superstition.
Capability indexes are statistics
Capability and performance…
Donald J. Wheeler
Walter Shewhart made a distinction between common causes and assignable causes based on the effects they have upon the process outcomes. While Shewhart’s distinction predated the arrival of chaos theory by 40 years, chaos theory provides a way to understand what Shewhart was talking about.…
William A. Levinson
Quality-related data collection is useful, but statistics can also deliver misleading and even dysfunctional results when incomplete. This is often the case when information is collected only from surviving people or products, extremely satisfied or dissatisfied customers, or propagators of bad…
Donald J. Wheeler
Many different approaches to process improvement are on offer today. An appreciation of the way each approach works is crucial to selecting an approach that will be effective. Here we look at the problem of production and consider how the different improvement approaches deal with this problem.…
Paul Laughlin
As I started reading The Book of Why: The New Science of Cause and Effect, by Judea Pearl and Dana Mackenzie (Basic Books, 2018), I was reminded how often analysts trot out the bromide “correlation is not causation.” It’s a well-known warning. Indeed, I often encourage those learning data…
Donald J. Wheeler
Students are told that they need to check their data for normality before doing virtually any data analysis. And today’s software encourages this by automatically providing normal probability plots and lack-of-fit statistics as part of the output. So it’s not surprising that many think this is the…
Donald J. Wheeler
Acceptance sampling uses the observed properties of a sample drawn from a lot or batch to make a decision about whether to accept or reject that lot or batch. Although the textbooks are full of complex descriptions of various acceptance sampling plans, there are some very important aspects of…
Danielle Underferth
As municipalities clamor for a slice of President Biden’s $1.2 trillion infrastructure spending bill, one Johns Hopkins scientist is re-examining one of the basic elements of road-building: Determining the width of road lanes. But determining the width that provides the highest level of safety,…
Scott A. Hindle
In 2010, new to the world of statistical process control (SPC), I was intrigued by Don Wheeler’s statement that “No data have meaning apart from their context” (from his book, Understanding Variation—The Key to Managing Chaos, SPC Press, 2000, available on Amazon). For a while, I didn’t really get…
Tristan Mobbs
All too often the topic of fixing dirty data is neglected in the plethora of online media covering artificial intelligence (AI), data science, and analytics. This is wrong for many reasons.
To highlight just one, confidence in the quality of data is the vital foundation of all analysis. This topic…
Donald J. Wheeler
Last month we looked at analyzing observational data. Here we will consider experimental data and discover a weakness in the way they are obtained that can contribute to the problem of nonreproducible results.
Background
The discipline of statistics grew up in agricultural and biomedical research…
Atul Minocha
Do you ever feel like you’re spending money like crazy on marketing and getting little or nothing in return? If so, you might be tempted to pull the plug on marketing altogether. That would be a big mistake.
An effective marketing strategy can mean the difference between your organization’s success…
Donald J. Wheeler
Most of the world’s data are obtained as byproducts of operations. These observational data track what happens over time and have a structure that requires a different approach to analysis than that used for experimental data. An understanding of this approach will reveal how Shewhart’s generic,…
Dr T Burns
I’m a chemical engineer. The fundamentals of the chemical engineering profession were laid down 150 years ago by Osborne Reynolds. Although chemical engineering has seen many advances, such as digital process control and evolutionary process optimization, every engineer understands and uses Reynold…
Donald J. Wheeler
On the face of it, it seems to be impossible for skewed variables to add up to a normally distributed result. Yet both common experience and mathematical theory combine to show us that this does indeed happen. In fact it is a fundamental property of probability theory which, in turn, explains the…
Donald J. Wheeler
Management requires prediction. However, when making predictions it is easy to torture the data until they surrender and tell you what you expect to hear. Even though this torture may be unintentional, it can keep you from hearing the story the data could tell. This column is about how to avoid…
W. Edwards Deming
Editor’s note: The following is from a transcript of a forgotten speech given in Tokyo in 1978 by W. Edwards Deming for the Union of Japanese Scientists and Engineers (JUSE). Because the original was a poor photocopy, there are small portions of text that could not be transcribed. Transcript…
Donald J. Wheeler
One of the most common questions about any production process is, “What is the fraction nonconforming?” Many different approaches have been used to answer this question. This article will compare the two most widely used approaches and define the essential uncertainty inherent for all of these…
Steve Moore
In this year’s April issue of the Bridge Bulletin, the ACBL (American Contract Bridge League) unveiled a new logo as part of a rebranding campaign to promote the beloved game of bridge to a wider audience. Included in the new logo is the tagline “Dealing Infinite Possibilities.” It is this tagline…
Donald J. Wheeler
First, let it be known that all charts for count-based data are charts for individual values. Regardless of whether we are working with a count or a rate, we obtain one value per time period and want to plot a point every time we get a value. This need to plot the current data is why the specialty…
