Hi Listers
I apologize to those who don't use Excel, but this seems important
enough to be using this list to distribute this info. Read on if you use
Excel for your stats analyses. Our staff statistician has been distributing
this. Christine
This is a very revealing article! Take note, and DO NOT USE EXCEL'S
STATS
PACKAGE!!
> The following is extracted from an article by Jon Honeyball in PC Pro,
> Issue 62, December 1999, pp 248-255.
>
> "In front of me right now is a paper entitled On the accuracy of
> statistical procedures in Microsoft Excel 97, reprinted from the
Journal
> of Computational Statistics and Data Analysis, which is a highly
> prestigious, refereed academic journal. I might without exaggeration
> call it 'the bible of computational statistics' and there's arguably
no
> higher reference in the world. The article comes from volume 31,
issue 1,
> 28
> July 1999.
>
> The abstract for the paper says: 'The reliability of statistical
> procedures in Excel are assessed in three areas: estimation (both
linear
> and nonlinear), random number generation, and statistical
distributions
> (such as for calculating p-values). Excel's performance in all three
> areas is found to be inadequate. Persons desiring to conduct
> statistical analyses of data are advised not to use Excel.' As an
opening
> statement,
> you must admit that it's a bit of a corker.
>
> The paper's authors, BD McCullough and Berry Wilson of the Federal
> Communications Commission in Washington DC, go on to describe in
precise
> detail how they applied the recently released StRD (Statistical
> Reference Datasets) from the American National Institute of Standards
and
> Technology to assess the performance of Excel in a wide range of
> statistical
> tests.
> The results are stunningly bad, and, worse still, the paper refers
> back to work done by Sawitski in 1994 on Excel 4 and the problems
reported
> then
> are still present in Excel 97. I've run some of the tests myself and
> they're still there in Excel 2000. The paper, which can't really be
> argued with, is littered with phrases like 'can be judged inadequate'
> and 'it can be deduced that Excel uses an unstable algorithm'. The
> authors
> find fault with its univariate summary statistics, analysis of
variance,
> linear regression, nonlinear regression, random number generation and
so
> forth. What can I say? If you use the statistics add-on package that
> ships with Excel, you really better know your stuff because Excel may
> well come up with wrong numbers.
>
> Excel's statistics add-on pack is riddled with potential disaster
> areas, and since it has been subjected to the best analysis available
in
> the world and found to be wholly lacking, the only applicable words
are
> 'avoid' and 'plague'. Instead, you should buy yourself a decent stats
> add-on package that has numerical methods that are open to peer review
> and whose authors know what they're doing (unfortunately, Microsoft's
> stats-pack team obviously doesn't)."
>
>
>
> The above shouldn't surprise anyone around here. I have been telling
> people to use "real" statistics packages like SAS and Minitab for
> years. Proper numerical estimation algorithms are written by
> statisticians, not Bill's point and click people.
phone: (819) 997 - 6082
fax: (819) 953 - 6612
email: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Address: Christine Eberl
Migratory Birds Technician
Canadian Wildlife Service
100 Gamelin Blvd
Hull, PQ
K1A 0H3
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