Laboratory Statistics

Methods in Chemistry and Health Sciences

Anders Kallner

• Publisher: Elsevier
• Year: 2017
• Print ISBN: 9780128143483
• eBook ISBN: 9780128143490
• Edition: 2
• Topic: Physical Sciences
• Subtopic: Analytic Chemistry

Laboratory Statistics: Methods in Chemistry and Health Science, Second Edition, presents common strategies for comparing and evaluating numerical laboratory data. In particular, the text deals with the type of data and problems that laboratory scientists and students in analytical chemistry, clinical chemistry, epidemiology, and clinical research face on a daily basis. This book takes the mystery out of statistics and provides simple, hands-on instructions in the format of everyday formulas. Spreadsheet shortcuts and functions are included, along with many simple worked examples. This book is a must-have guide to applied statistics in the lab that will result in improved experimental design and analysis. This thoroughly revised second edition includes several new sections, more examples, and all formulas in Excel code.- Provides comprehensive coverage of simple statistical concepts- Familiarizes the reader with formatted statistical expression- Presents simple, worked examples that make formulas easy to apply- Includes spreadsheet functions that demonstrate how to find immediate solutions to common problems

Formulas

Abstract

The handbook comprises 17 sections. Each section is subdivided into a suitable number of topics.

The rules and practices of the nomenclature used are listed in a subchapter. Generally established symbols and abbreviations are used throughout the handbook. These are chosen from recommendations by established international and national organizations, e.g., ISO, IUPAC, IFCC, and NIST. Therefore, an introductory section on the basic concepts used, e.g logarithms, rounding of numerical values and scales, is presented.

Fundamental for the understanding of statistics is recognizing the distribution of data. A section is devoted to the normal and t-distributions. Much of statistics is related to probabilities and the next section discusses this, the estimation and expression of probabilities.

In applied sciences and particularly in those disciplines where experimental work is included, there is a need for robust estimates, e.g., a choice of central tendencies and trimmed datasets.

The concept of uncertainty in measurements used in the accreditation of laboratories is described in some detail and different estimation techniques are described. In this section Monte Carlo simulations and bootstrapping are described.

A major task in laboratories is to compare different datasets, which come from the comparison of measurement procedures and from the comparison of results obtained in different experimental models. This opens a wide field of different statistical procedures including analysis of variance and variance components.

A related field is regression and correlation. The handbook is limited to linear problems and devotes two sections to these and related problems.

Particularly in health sciences, it is important to describe the influence of quantity measurements on the interpretation of results. Bayes’ theorem plays a major part in this and the handbook also introduces Receiver Operating Characteristics (ROC) techniques.

Finally, power analysis and categorical assessme...

Table of contents

• Cover image
• Title page
• Table of Contents
• Copyright
• Preface to the Second Edition
• Preface and Introduction to the First Edition
• Some Notes on Nomenclature
• Formulas
• Some Metrological Concepts
• Further Reading
• Index