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Chat Wacharamanotham, Krishna Subramanian, Sarah Theres Völkel, Jan Borchers
Statsplorer: Guiding Novices in Statistical Analysis
In CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems Proceedings (CHI 2015), Seoul, Korea, April 18 - 23, 2015. ACM, New York, NY, USA, (bib)

Each step of statistical analysis requires researchers to make decisions based on both statistical knowledge and the knowledge of their own data. For novice analysts, this is cognitively demanding and can lead to mistakes and misinterpretations of the results. We present Statsplorer, a software that helps novices learn and perform inferential statistical tests. It lets the user kick-start data analysis from their research questions. Statsplorer automatically tests necessary statistical assumptions and uses visualizations to guide the user in both selecting statistical tests and interpreting the results. We compared Statsplorer with a statistics lecture and investigated how Statsplorer prepares novices for learning statistics in an AB/BA crossover experiment. The results indicates that using Statsplorer prior to the lecture leads to significantly better test scores in understanding statistical assumptions and choosing appropriate statistical tests. Statsplorer is open-source and is available online at: http://hci.rwth-aachen.de/statsplorer.