Statistics

Prism offers a more comprehensive set of tools to analyze your data than any other scientific graphics package. While it won't replace a heavy-duty statistics program, Prism lets you easily perform basic statistical tests commonly used by laboratory and clinical researchers. Prism offers t tests, nonparametric comparisons, one- and two-way ANOVA, linear and nonlinear regression, analysis of contingency tables, and survival analysis. See a complete lists of available tests.

Unlike other programs, Prism provides statistical help when you need it. Press "Learn" from any data analysis dialog and Prism's online documentation will explain the principles of the analysis to help you make appropriate choices. Once you've made your choices, Prism presents the results on organized, easy-to-follow tables. If you need help understanding the statistical terminology in the results table, Prism's unique analysis checklists take you to analysis explanations and help you check to make sure you chose an analysis appropriate for your experimental design.

The Prism documentation goes beyond anything you would expect. More than half of it is devoted to thorough explanations of basic statistics and nonlinear curve fitting, to teach you what you need to know to appropriately analyze your data.

The Prism 5 help system is a wonderful resource for learning about statistics. Our Guided Examples teach you how to think about statistics, as well as how to use Prism. All the examples use sample data built-in to the program, so you can easily work through the examples without any tedious data entry. There are more than a dozen examples ranging from a simple unpaired t test to repeated measures two-way ANOVA, survival analysis, contingency tables and more.

Guided examples: Statistical analyses

Available tests:
Statistical comparisons

• Paired or unpaired t tests
• Mann-Whitney or Wilcoxon tests
• Ordinary or repeated measures one-way ANOVA with Tukey, Newman-Keuls, Dunnett or Bonferroni post tests, or the post-test for trend
• Kruskal-Wallis or Friedman nonparametric one-way ANOVA with Dunn's post test
• Fisher's exact test or the chi-square test. Calculate the relative risk and odds ratio with confidence intervals
• Two-way ANOVA, even with missing values with some post tests
• Repeated measures two-way ANOVA with some post tests
• Kaplan-Meier survival analysis. Compare curves with the log-rank test (including test for trend)

Column statistics

• Calculate min, max, quartiles, mean, SD, SEM, CI, CV, Geometric mean with Confidence Intervals
• Specify desired level of confidence
• Frequency distributions (bin to histogram), including cumulative histograms.
• Kolmogorov-Smirnov normality test
• One sample t test or Wilcoxon test to compare the column mean (or median) with a theoretical value
• Skewness and Kurtosis

Linear regression and correlation

• Calculate slope and intercept with confidence intervals
• Force the regression line through a specified point
• Fit to replicate Y values or mean Y
• Test for departure from linearity with a runs test
• Calculate and graph residuals
• Compare slopes and intercepts of two or more regression lines
• Determine new points along the standard curve
• Pearson or Spearman (nonparametric) correlation
• Table of XY coordinates

Clinical (diagnostic) lab statistics

• Bland-Altman plots
• Receiver operator characteristic (ROC) curves