We have – in this microseries of miniblogs – looked at data distributions and describing what we’ve got. We’re ready for the big leap now; from description into inference. What can we say about how our data relate to the world at large? And the first thing to do is to clarify a deeply unhelpful term.

Parametric.

It just means statistical tests  because “my data is Normal“. (And if you’ve done a transformation  to make it Normal, you can use these transformed data with parametric stats.)

Now, can you guess what non-parametric means?

Hurray! It means statistical tests for when “my data is non-Normal”. That might be skewed continuous stuff, or categorical data like dead/alive counts.

Glad we’ve cleared that up. We’ll be onto bootstrapped estimates of regression covariates before you can slip a 24G in a neonate …

– Archi