27.1 Basic Statistics

Many of the tools used to run hypothesis tests are found under Basic Statistics in the Stat menu.

Descriptive and Store Descriptive Statistics

Sometimes, you need to know the mean, standard deviation, or some other descriptive statistic about your data sample. When running many hypothesis tests, you need such data. Minitab’s Descriptive Statistics function lets you run all of the most common statistics at one time, and you can store them in a worksheet for reference as you work on analysis.

Time	Temperature A
1	30
2	35
3	37
4	40
5	41
6	48
7	57
8	55
9	59
10	62
11	63
12	65

Copy the data above into Minitab. Select Stat > Basic Statistics > Display Descriptive Statistics. Select the temperature column as the variable.

Click Statistics. Check the box next to each statistic you would like to display.

Click OK. Click OK again. Minitab displays the statistics in the session window.

Descriptive Statistics: Temperature A

Variable        N N*   Mean SE Mean StDev Minimum      Q1 Median     Q3 Maximum Temperature A 12 0 49.33 3.55 12.31    30.00 37.75   51.50 61.25                65.00 Complete the exact same series of steps, but choose Store Descriptive Statistics instead of Display Descriptive Statistics. Minitab will place the statistics in the workbook.

Regression Analysis

Use the data of temperature over time you copied above to run a regression analysis in Minitab. The question you want to answer is: Is there a correlation between the temperature and the time? Select Stat > Regression > Fitted Line Plot. Choose the temperature column as the response variable and the time column as the predictor variable.

Click OK.

Minitab returns the fitted line plot along with R-squared values, which you can interpret following the
information from chapter 19.