ABSTRACT
This chapter discusses: the characteristic features of a regression analysis; how methods presented in this book can be distinguished on the basis of classification of variables; probability distributions, in particular the normal distribution; the distinction between a target population and a sampled population; generalization of results; hypothesis testing; why p-values have to be viewed with caution; caveats regarding confidence interval estimation; Type I and Type II errors; the power of a hypothesis test; robustness of a hypothesis test; missing data; distinctions between an observational study, a quasi-experiment and a controlled randomized trial; the importance of data editing before applying a statistical analysis; and SAS programming basics.
