I’m going to carry the following text with me on a note card from now on to hand to people who ask what it is I do during the day:
Mean, median, 5% trimmed mean, standard error, variance, standard deviation, minimum, maximum, range, interquartile range, skewness and kurtosis and their standard errors, confidence interval for the mean (and specified confidence level), percentiles, Huber’s M-estimator, Andrews’ wave estimator, Hampel’s redescending M-estimator, Tukey’s biweight estimator, the five largest and five smallest values, the Kolmogorov-Smirnov statistic with a Lilliefors significance level for testing normality, and the Shapiro-Wilk statistic. Boxplots, stem-and-leaf plots, histograms, normality plots, and spread-versus-level plots with Levene tests and transformations.
Talk about tools of the trade. Sheesh. I spend 50% of my day learning and the other 50% applying what I’ve learned. Rinse. Repeat.