The Pittsburgh Penguins are in the midst of another Stanley Cup playoff run. With a 3-1 lead over the Ottawa Senators, they are a mere 1 game away from their 3rd Eastern Conference Final in 6 years. But it looks like they will do so without starting goalie Marc-Andre Fleury.

After a string of disappointing playoff games, Fleury has been benched and netminder Tomas Vokoun has been guarding the goal. And Vokoun is playing so well that it doesn’t look like Fleury will see the ice anytime soon.

So what does this have to do with statistics? Well, Fleury’s statistics tell the story of why he is on...

I spend a majority of my time entrenched in statistics. Using statistics. Studying statistics. Developing and testing statistical software. Statistics guide many of my decisions at work and in life. That’s the world of an engineer.

For this reason, you can imagine my surprise when my husband called me at work on a bright, sunny June day in 2009 to tell me that our 4-year-old daughter had been diagnosed with Lyme disease. That, to me, seemed completely improbable. We live in a development in suburbia.  Our children don’t play deep in the woods. We don’t hike in the woods. In accordance with the...

Over on the Indium Corporation's blog, Dr. Ron Lasky has been sharing some interesting ideas about using the Weibull distribution in electronics manufacturing. For instance, check out this discussion of how dramatically an early first-failure can affect an analysis of a part or component (in this case, an alloy used to solder components to a circuit board). 

This got me thinking again about all the different situations in which the Weibull distribution can help us make good decisions. The main reason Weibull is so useful is that it's very flexible in fitting different types of data, because it...

Have you ever seen those commercials where people are walking at a slant because they haven't had their V8? 

I was reminded of these ads recently when I had the opportunity to visit one of our Minitab customers in Tampa, Fl.  During the visit, I presented a seminar on some Advanced Minitab Tips and Tricks* using the same content we have presented in some of our free webinars. 

One of the very first scenarios in the presentation walks through data cleanup in your Minitab worksheet. As I started, I literally had to stop the class to address the commotion this topic kicked up on one side of the...

For providers like Riverview Hospital Association, serving Wisconsin Rapids, Wis. and surrounding areas, recent changes in the U.S. healthcare system have placed more emphasis on improving the quality of care and increasing patient satisfaction. “In this era of healthcare reform, it is even more essential for providers to have a systematic method to improve the way care is delivered,” says Christopher Spranger, director of Lean Six Sigma and Quality Improvement at Riverview Hospital Association. “We have had a Lean Six Sigma program in place for four years, and we are continuously working on...

Failure to properly calibrate this machine will result in defective rock and roll. 

In my last post, I imagined using the example of a rock and roll band -- the Zero Sigmas -- to explain Pareto charts to my music-loving but statistically-challenged boss. I showed him how easy it was to use a Pareto chart to visualize defects or problems that occur most often, using the example of various incidents that occurred on the Zero Sigmas last tour.  

The Pareto chart revealed that starting performances late was far and away the Zero Sigmas' most frequent "defect," one that occurred every single night of...

Should this doctor consult a regression model?

In a previous post, I wrote about how the field of statistics is more important now than ever before due to the modern deluge of data. Because you’re reading Minitab's statistical blog, I’ll assume that we’re in agreement that statistics allows you to use data to understand reality. However, I’d also bet that you’re picturing important but “typical” statistical studies, such as studies where Six Sigma analysts determine which factors affect product quality. Or perhaps medical studies, like determining the effectiveness of flu shots.

In this post,...

Normally, I tell you about ways to practice with Minitab Statistical Software so that you can boost your confidence with statistical analysis. But over the last few days in my house, we’ve been planning some activities for the family. That planning has given me a chance to have some fun with Quality Companion.

Quality Companion is a substantial piece of software: everything that you need to manage a quality improvement project in one application. Quality Companion provides project management tools so that you can make and communicate decisions.

My favorite tools in Quality Companion, with...

We usually think of games as a distraction—just something we do for fun. However, growing evidence suggests that games can do much more, especially when it comes to learning in a classroom setting.

Because statistics is a topic that doesn’t come easily to most, using properly designed games to teach statistics can become a valuable tool to spark interest and help explain difficult concepts.

So what kinds of “properly designed” games are we talking about here? Not traditional board games like Monopoly or Chutes and Ladders, but interactive computer games—the types of games younger generations...

Unless you’re 3 years old, you probably can’t have things just the way you want them all the time.  

You can’t always have peanut butter and ranch dressing on your toast. Or ketchup on your pineapple. Or sugar sprinkles on your peas.

But there is one small arena in life over which you can still exert your control. 

Tools > Options in Minitab's statistical software allows you to change selected default settings in the software, without having to throw a temper tantrum first.

This powerful, underutilized feature in Minitab may save you from the inconvenience of having to change a default setting...

After another round of what seems like endless conference realignment, the Big Ten has settled on 14 teams split into two divisions; East and West. However, with the likes of Ohio State, Penn State, Michigan, and Michigan State, the East division appears to be much stronger. In fact, Indiana athletic director Fred Glass called it the “Big Boy Division,” and Penn State coach Bill O’Brien referred to it as “Murderers' Row.”

But will the statistics back up their claims? After all, it’s easy to spout off any opinion you want. I could claim that the Sun Belt is a better football conference than the...

I'm in the airport at Indianapolis, waiting to go home after three exciting days at the 2013 American Society for Quality World Conference.  As I write this, it's Wednesday evening after the conference has closed, and it turns out my flight has been delayed.

This could give me ample opportunity to muse about the quality issues that might keep me from reaching central Pennsylvania tonight. But I'm kind of pumped up, so I'm more interested in thinking about what I've experienced and seen over the past few days. This is the kind of event that makes you want to keep focusing on the positive, not...

As we said in yesterday’s post, it’s been exciting for Minitab to be a supporter of the ASQ World Conference on Quality and Improvement taking place this week in Indianapolis. There have been many great sessions and an abundance of case studies shared that highlight how quality teams worldwide are improving the performance of their businesses.

One session that generated a lot of interest from the conference participants was conducted by Minitab trainers Lou Johnson, Daniel Griffith and Jim Colton.

Their presentation, Sampling Plan for Expanded Gage R&R Studies, covered Gage R&R studies and how...

The 2013 ASQ World Conference is taking place this week in Indianapolis, Indiana, and it's been a treat to see how our software was used in the projects highlighted in many of the presentations. As a supporter of the conference, a key event for quality practitioners around the world, Minitab was proud to sponsor one of the presentations that seemed to get a lot of attendees talking. Scott Sterbenz, a Six Sigma leader from Ford Motor Company, delivered a presentation entitled "Leveraging Designed Experiments for Success," which explained how to make designed experiments succeed with examples...

I once had a boss who had difficulty understanding many, many things. When I need to discuss statistical concepts with people who don't have a statistical background, I like to think about how I could explain things so even my old boss would get it. 

My boss and I shared a common interest in rock and roll, so that's the device I'll use to explain one of the workhorses of quality statistics, the Pareto chart. I'd tell my boss to imagine that instead of managing a surly gang of teenaged restaurant employees, he's managing a surly rock and roll band, the Zero Sigmas. The band did a 100-date tour...

Control charts are used to monitor the stability of processes, and can turn time-ordered data for a particular characteristic—such as product weight or hold time at a call center—into a picture that is easy to understand. These charts indicate when there are points out of control or unusual shifts in a process.

Statistically speaking, control charts help you detect nonrandom sources of variation in the data. In other words, they separate variation due to common causes from variation due to special causes, where:

• Common cause variation is variation that is naturally inherent in a process, and...

Multicollinearity is problem that you can run into when you’re fitting a regression model, or other linear model. It refers to predictors that are correlated with other predictors in the model. Unfortunately, the effects of multicollinearity can feel murky and intangible, which makes it unclear whether it’s important to fix.

My goal in this blog post is to bring the effects of multicollinearity to life with real data! Along the way, I’ll show you a simple tool that can remove multicollinearity in some cases.

 My goal in this blog post is to bring multicollinearity to life with real data about...

One of the more misunderstood concepts in statistics is alpha, more formally known as the significance level. Alpha is typically set before you conduct an experiment. When the calculated p-value from a hypothesis test is less than the significance level (α), the results of an experiment are so unlikely to happen by chance that the more likely explanation is the results occur because of the effect being studied. That the results are unlikely to happen by chance is what we mean by the phrase “statistical significance,” not to be confused with practical significance.

There was a wonderful example...

You know the drill…you’re in Six Sigma training and you’re learning how to conduct a design of experiment (DOE). Everything is making sense, and you’ve started thinking about how you’ll apply what you are learning to find the optimal settings of a machine on the factory floor. You’ve even got the DOE setup chosen and you know the factors you want to test …

Then … BAM! … You’re on your own and you immediately have issues analyzing the data. The design you’ve chosen might actually not be the best for the results you need.  It's a classic case of learning something in theory that becomes much more...

  “Shall I compare thee to a standard normal distribution?
  Thou art more symmetric and more bell-shaped…”  — Melvin Shakespeare (William’s lesser-known statistician brother)

The Greek philosopher Aristotle believed that symmetry was one of the primary elements of the universal ideal of beauty. Over 2000 years later, emerging research seems to bear him out. 

Studies suggest we tend to be more attracted to people with symmetrical bodies. Using motion-capture technology to record the movements of people dancing to a popular song, one recent study concluded that we even prefer those who dance...