Born to be geek! -- Statistics2023-01-05T18:15:16+01:00http://herraiz.org/blog/tags/statistics/Israel Herraizisra@herraiz.orgDon't do empirical software engineering with Excel2012-11-23T00:00:00+01:00http://herraiz.org/blog/2012/11/23/dont-do-empirical-software-engineering-with-excel<p>
Or any other statistical analysis. From time to time, I see papers
published in Empirical Software Engineering conferences and journals
that have used Excel for the statistical analyses (although I would
not point here to any of those papers :). I have not liked this much,
but it was mostly because of personal taste, and probably also a sort
of prejudice.
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But I found <a href="http://www.pages.drexel.edu/%7Ebdm25/excel2007.pdf">this paper</a> today:
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<blockquote>
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On the accuracy of statistical procedures in Microsoft Excel 2007 <br />
B.D. McCullough , David A. Heiser <br />
<i>Computational Statistics and Data Analysis</i> 52 (2008) 4570–4578
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The paper remarks some of the flaws of Excel 2007 in standard
statistical methods. Two of the flaws are related to the least squares
fitting of exponential models, and to the normality plot of a sample
against the deciles of the Normal distribution. Apparently, this
situation has repeated since years ago with every new release of
Excel. Some of the problems have even been claimed to be fixed, while
the truth is that they remain providing wrong results.
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If you use Excel in your research, I think you would better consider
switching to <a href="http://www.r-project.org/">GNU R</a>, and its superb IDE <a href="http://www.rstudio.com/ide/">R Studio</a>.
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