What does cell biology data look like?

If I’m going to evaluate the widespread use of t-tests/ANOVAs on count data in bench biology then I’d like to know what these data look like, specifically the shape (“overdispersion”) parameter. Set up library(ggplot2) library(readxl) library(ggpubr) library(cowplot) library(plyr) #mapvalues library(data.table) # glm packages library(MASS) library(pscl) #zeroinfl library(DHARMa) library(mvabund) data_path <- "../data" # notebook, console source("../../../R/clean_labels.R") # notebook, console Data from The enteric nervous system promotes intestinal health by constraining microbiota composition Import read_enteric <- function(sheet_i, range_i, file_path, wide_2_long=TRUE){ dt_wide <- data.

GLM vs. t-tests vs. non-parametric tests if all we care about is NHST -- Update

Update to the earlier post, which was written in response to my own thinking about how to teach stastics to experimental biologists working in fields that are dominated by hypothesis testing instead of estimation. That is, should these researchers learn GLMs or is a t-test on raw or log-transformed data on something like count data good enough – or even superior? My post was written without the benefit of either [Ives](Ives, Anthony R.

GLM vs. t-tests vs. non-parametric tests if all we care about is NHST

This post has been updated. A skeleton simulation of different strategies for NHST for count data if all we care about is a p-value, as in bench biology where p-values are used to simply give one confidence that something didn’t go terribly wrong (similar to doing experiments in triplicate – it’s not the effect size that matters only “we have experimental evidence of a replicable effect”). tl;dr - At least for Type I error at small $$n$$, log(response) and Wilcoxan have the best performance over the simulation space.

Should the model-averaged prediction be computed on the link or response scale in a GLM?

[updated to include additional output from MuMIn, BMA, and BAS] This post is a follow up to my inital post, which was written as as a way for me to pen my mental thoughts on the recent review of “Model averaging in ecology: a review of Bayesian, information‐theoretic and tactical approaches for predictive inference”. It was also written without contacting and discussing the issue with the authors. This post benefits from a series of e-mails with the lead author Carsten Dormann and the last author Florian Hartig.

R doodles. Some ecology. Some physiology. Much fake data.

Thoughts on R, statistical best practices, and teaching applied statistics to Biology majors.

Jeff Walker, Professor of Biological Sciences

University of Southern Maine, Portland, Maine, United States