Statistical functions with E-Basic?

[Alex Francis]

I just had a similar problem. I ended up implementing the approximation of
the z transform given in Macmillan & Creelman (1991) "Signal Detection
Theory: A User's Guide" [a newer version of this book is now available and
I recommend it to everyone].  It seems to work pretty well:

I also implemented it in Excel and compared it with the Normsinv function -
the two give very similar results for values of p < .99 (within a z value
of 0.01 or so).

Here is the function pasted in from Excel (the eprime code is on a
different machine - let me know if you'd rather see that).

= - 1 * D5 + ((((0.0000453642210148 * D5 + 0.0204231210245) * D5 +
0.342242088547) * D5 + 1) * D5 + 0.322232431088) / ((((0.0038560700634 * D5
+ 0.10353775285) * D5 + 0.531103462366) * D5 + 0.588581570495) * D5 +
0.099348462606)

Hope this helps,

-alex

At 03:21 PM 3/15/2005, Ignacio Valdes wrote:
>Hello all, I've created a E-prime task that I would like to report summary
>statistics after running such as Discrminability. A key function to
>accomplish this would be a lookup for the z and ordinal statistics value
>for a given p. The table for me to implement this myself would consist of
>me keying in 300 normal distribution entries. This is something that I
>would rather not do because most importantly, the possibility of
>inaccuracy. I have talked to E-prime's technical support people and they
>are unable to help me with this. They are saying that the underlying Basic
>that they have licensed from a different company doesn't have these
>functions which I find odd. E-prime mysteriously includes a number of
>financial calculation functions such as mortgage calculations, but no
>basic statistic functions? Possible solutions I have are ugly:
>
>1) Implement it myself -- possible inaccuracies, tedious, maintenance is
>an issue.
>2) Use DDE functions to try to hook Excel into calculating it -- Not sure
>this is possible with the limited command set available.
>
>Does anyone have ideas on how to solve this?
>
>Thanks,
>
>-- IV
>

   Alexander L. Francis        http://web.ics.purdue.edu/~francisa
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