Why knowledge of statistical analysis is obligatory in any field of research?

 

     Statistical analysis is not only for statistician but for every researcher.

Science always deals with the truth or facts and truth can be revealed only if adequate amount of information is available. Now, it is not always necessary that all the information you acquire are needed to be true. Then how will you decide that whether the information you get is true or not? Here, knowledge of statistics comes. Statistics can obviously help you to identify truth and falsity.

In science, information is popularly known as ‘Data’. With experiments you may collect sufficient amount of data, but it is also important to be alert and accurate during collection of the data. I have already discussed on this topic of data collection in a separate article titled ‘How to Manage Data to Manage Your Scientific Career?” in this blog. You may read it if you intend. In brief, maintaining the purity in data collection is very important if you really want to uncover the truth through your scientific research, which can make big impact in your scientific publications. Nevertheless, only collection of good data is not sufficient for good research, analysis of data is also very important. This can only be done if you have a good skill of statistical analysis. In my experience, I have seen that most of the researchers use to struggle to establish their hypothesis in a good scientific project due to the lack of sufficient skill of statistical analysis. Even they struggle to publish nice data in nice journals as they do not put effort to analyze the data in a proper way or fail to present the data in a comprehensive manner. Here, it should always be remembered that the skill of presenting data is a ‘Big Skill’, specifically when you are presenting a relatively complex experimental or theoretical work and when you are doing it in an era of data science. The quality of data analysis and presentation is always depended on statistical tools those you are using for analyzing the data.

Basic statistical knowledge can give you a lot and lack of that knowledge may cause a huge loss to you during your research work. If you never had the interest to learn the basic statistics like mean, median, mode, distribution, null hypothesis, probability etc. and if you are still not interested to learn these after professionally entering in the field of science as a researcher then I must say science is not your field, you may try some other things. If you are not aware about the basic analytical methods such as t-test, chi-squire test, ANOVA, different type of post-hoc tests then my suggestion will be to learn them as soon as possible or may leave your professional field because as without eyesight you cannot drive a car, without the basic statistical knowledge you cannot drive any scientific experiment. In both the cases if you try there will be a huge chance to make an accident. In the current era of data science, each and every research field is connected to the complex data analysis skill and data visualization, for which you need to learn the statistics and related tools for computation. If you are feeling cool to use the term ‘Machine Learning’ or ‘Artificial Intelligence’ and want to apply those in you research then you should also be cool to learn the statistical analysis because ‘Machine Learning’ or ‘Artificial Intelligence’ is nothing but the bunch of algorithms based on methods of complex statistical analysis of the data.

Therefore, learning statistics is not only ‘learning statistics’ but also learning to unveil the truth from your collected data in experiment. If you think that you are a researcher or PhD student in biology or chemistry and you do not need to learn ‘Statistics’ then that will be the biggest mistake in long term. Since, now a day without robust statistical validation you cannot sell your data to any good platform including good impact holding journals. Currently, there are numerous online and digital platforms such as youtube, blogs, digital books etc. from where you may easily learn basic statistics as well as complex data analysis methods provided you have passion or eagerness. Then start your journey to this new skill for the sake of your scientific research.