A recent article in the Guardian newspaper reports on a study published last month that looks at parents' responses to news from the Ofsted inspection of their child's school. Aside from the eye-catching headline, we found a number of aspects of this study interesting.
read moreUnderstanding the outputs from a model can sometimes be daunting. In this post, we show how we can convert the outputs from a multinomial logistic regression to gain more easily interpretable insights from the model.
read moreA recent article in the Guardian newspaper reports new research highlighting that disadvantage is the main factor affecting student outcomes. Not only does this concur with our results from a recent blog, but it highlights how important both the type of analysis conducted and the clarity of reporting is to enable others to evaluate the often conflicting findings based on data.
read moreMost statistical analyses assume that the data collected are from a simple random sample of the population of interest. However, it’s not always possible or practical to take a SRS, and complex samples can be used to create more efficient or cheaper sampling designs.
read moreIn a recent post we introduced some basic techniques for summarising and analysing categorical survey data. Whilst these methods are a great way to start exploring your categorical data, to really investigate them fully, we can apply a more formal approach.
read moreIn this latest blog post in our Market Research terminology series, we discuss CHAID - an algorithm that is useful when looking for patterns in datasets with lots of categorical variables and that offers a convenient way of visualising relationships in the data.
read moreIt’s important to identify and understand the drivers of key business outcomes. You might want to understand which aspects of your service influence how likely a customer will be to recommend you, for example. A so called key driver analysis can be used to address this sort of question.
read moreIn our latest blog on the EU referendum we look at fitting a model to the opinion poll results published in the run up to June 23rd. The model highlights how polling companies and practices influence the results and concludes that as of May 24th the probability of the UK remaining in the EU is about 68%.
read moreRetailers have been finding more and more sophisticated ways to use customer data to their advantage. By collecting and analysing consumer data, together with other socio-economic data, supermarkets are able to make evidence-based decisions when devising their marketing and operational strategies.
read moreSurveys often comprise tick-box questions, resulting in what are referred to statistically as categorical data. Analysing categorical data requires the use of a specialist set of statistical tools as they are not normally amenable to the standard tools available for continuous data.
read moreWith the majority of large commercial organisations embracing Big Data as a means to refine their products and better understand their customers, the charitable sector has been slow to adopt the same techniques to streamline their operations and increase their donation rates.
read moreThe ability to analyse and interpret data is becoming an increasingly critical factor in driving commercial innovation and success. Businesses are collecting data on a scale previously unseen, but if you want to understand and use your data, how do you go about it?
read moreWe regularly analyse data to help our clients gain key insights so that they can make effective decisions. In many cases, clients will be interested in the results for different scenarios and we've been developing the capability to enable our clients to interact with their data via online interactive tools or web apps.
read moreThis lighthearted cartoon from XKCD makes an important point about classical hypothesis testing: if you test enough things you’re bound to find something that’s significant. To avoid this and many other pitfalls of a naive application of statistical methods, it is important to seek statistical advice.
read more