statistics review 1 presenting and summarising data统计评估1展示和总结数据.pdfVIP

Critical Care February 2002 Vol 6 No 1 Whitley and Ball Review Statistics review 1: Presenting and summarising data Elise Whitley* and Jonathan Ball† *Lecturer in Medical Statistics, University of Bristol, Bristol, UK †Lecturer in Intensive Care Medicine, St George’s Hospital Medical School, London, UK Correspondence: Editorial Office, Critical Care, editorial@ Published online: 29 November 2001 Critical Care 2002, 6:66-71 © 2002 BioMed Central Ltd (Print ISSN 1364-8535; Online ISSN 1466-609X) Abstract The present review is the first in an ongoing guide to medical statistics, using specific examples from intensive care. The first step in any analysis is to describe and summarize the data. As well as becoming familiar with the data, this is also an opportunity to look for unusually high or low values (outliers), to check the assumptions required for statistical tests, and to decide the best way to categorize the data if this is necessary. In addition to tables and graphs, summary values are a convenient way to summarize large amounts of information. This review introduces some of these measures. It describes and gives examples of qualitative data (unordered and ordered) and quantitative data (discrete and continuous); how these types of data can be represented figuratively; the two important features of a quantitative dataset (location and variability); the measures of location (mean, median and mode); the measures of variability (range, interquartile range, standard deviation and variance); common distributions of clinical data; and simple transformati