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Beyond differences in means: robust graphical methods to compare two groups in neuroscience

View ORCID ProfileGuillaume A. Rousselet, View ORCID ProfileCyril R. Pernet, View ORCID ProfileRand R. Wilcox
doi: https://doi.org/10.1101/121079
Guillaume A. Rousselet
1Institute of Neuroscience and Psychology, College of Medical, Veterinary and Life Sciences, University of Glasgow, 58 Hillhead Street, G12 8QB, Glasgow, UK
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  • For correspondence: Guillaume.Rousselet@glasgow.ac.uk
Cyril R. Pernet
2Centre for Clinical Brain Sciences, Neuroimaging Sciences, University of Edinburgh, Chancellor’s Building, Edinburgh EH16 4SB, UK
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Rand R. Wilcox
3Dept. of Psychology, University of Southern California, Los Angeles, CA 90089-1061, USA
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Abstract

If many changes are necessary to improve the quality of neuroscience research, one relatively simple step could have great pay-offs: to promote the adoption of detailed graphical methods, combined with robust inferential statistics. If neuroscience experiments often lead to large, complex and multidimensional data, most analyses rely on t-tests and ANOVAs on means. These analyses are of limited sensitivity to differences among distributions and perform poorly for data that do not conform to the tests’ assumptions. Results also rarely show the underlying distributions by using inappropriate graphical representations such as bar graphs. Here we present powerful alternative tools that provide both detailed illustrations of effects and robust inferences. These tools quantify how distributions differ and can be applied at different levels of analysis. We describe this graphical approach to group comparisons, and provide implementations in R and Matlab.

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The copyright holder for this preprint is the author/funder, who has granted bioRxiv a license to display the preprint in perpetuity. It is made available under a CC-BY 4.0 International license.
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Posted March 27, 2017.
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Beyond differences in means: robust graphical methods to compare two groups in neuroscience
Guillaume A. Rousselet, Cyril R. Pernet, Rand R. Wilcox
bioRxiv 121079; doi: https://doi.org/10.1101/121079
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Beyond differences in means: robust graphical methods to compare two groups in neuroscience
Guillaume A. Rousselet, Cyril R. Pernet, Rand R. Wilcox
bioRxiv 121079; doi: https://doi.org/10.1101/121079

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