INFORMS Open Forum

Statistical Power Calculator - Compilation and Praise

  • 1.  Statistical Power Calculator - Compilation and Praise

    Posted 11-27-2019 20:07
    Hi all - once again INFORMS rocks. I put out a request for online interactive calculators for the statistical power of a test (i.e. the famous alpha and the infamous beta) for an undergrad stats class. You all came up with several customizable calculators, fun animations, a textbook, and a library in R.

    Here's what you all suggested, roughly in the order you suggested them to me:

    * Andrew Ross, Eastern Michigan University - https://www.desmos.com/calculator/qa1zy0yd12. This is a Desmos calculator he wrote, and I liked it enough I used this in my class. The reason I chose this one is it's fully customizable - i.e. I could get my mu to be 55 if I wanted it there. Thank you Andrew!

    * Andrew also recommended https://istats.shinyapps.io/power/ from http://www.artofstat.com/webapps.html and another one he wrote in Desmos https://www.desmos.com/calculator/gyej6qxnlc for people who like their tradeoffs between significance and power animated (why does that sound like something far, far from applied mathematics?)

    * Scott Nestler, University of Notre Dame - fbdarku.shinyapps.io/PowerAnalysis and casertamarco.shinyapps.io/power.

    * Neal Fultz (nfultz@gmail.com) offers the DeclareDesign inspector (https://declaredesign.org/library/), and says it is helpful, especially for more complicated models. He welcomes any feedback from the community.  This is in R.

    * Phil Troy (DrPhil@philtroy.net) found https://www.surveysystem.com/sscalc.htm. He has not verified it, and we all know not to believe everything we see on the Internet, so if anybody knows yea or nay on this one, please let him (and us) know.

    * Larry Leemis at William & Mary pulls a "Hail Mary" here and answers questions I never thought to ask before. He's offering a calculus-based probability book, an R book, and soon a mathematical statistics book, self-published, all hanging off his homepage at www.math.wm.edu/~leemis. If some is good, more should be better, and upon request he's got videos, solution sets, and lecture notes to share.

    * Larry's students also did this: www.math.wm.edu/~leemis/chart/UDR/UDR.html, an interactive chart that will let you click on pretty much any branch of prob/stat you want and it will jump you to a pdf of more than you wanted to know about it. This is the inside front cover of your grad school stats book, on steroids, and it runs using technology from an era in which my coffeemaker is officially smarter than the computer running the Apollo missions. All of them. Combined.

    Thank you INFORMS and if anybody has anything else to add, please let me know.  My students will be using these things early spring, hopefully modestly enough that we don't break the Internet.

    -- Carrie

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    Carrie Beam
    Clinical Assistant Professor
    University of Arkansas
    Walnut Creek CA
    carrie@carriebeamconsulting.com
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