[R] Simple General Statistics and R question (with 3 line example) - get z value from pairwise.wilcox.test

[peter dalgaard]

On Apr 28, 2011, at 15:18 , JP wrote:

> 
> 
> I have found that when doing a wilcoxon signed ranked test you should report:
> 
> - The median value (and not the mean or sd, presumably because of the
> underlying potential non normal distribution)
> - The Z score (or value)
> - r
> - p value
> 

...printed on 40g/m^2 acid free paper with a pencil of 3B softness?

Seriously, with nonparametrics, the p value is the only thing of real interest, the other stuff is just attempting to check on authors doing their calculations properly. The median difference is of some interest, but it is not actually what is being tested, and in heavily tied data, it could even be zero with a highly significant p-value. The Z score can in principle be extracted from the p value (qnorm(p/2), basically) but it's obviously unstable in the extreme cases. What is r? The correlation? Pearson, not Spearman?

> My questions are:
> 
> - Are the above enough/correct values to report (some places even
> quote W and df) ?

df is silly, and/or blatantly wrong... 

>  What else would you suggest?
> - How do I calculate the Z score and r for the above example?
> - How do I get each statistic from the pairwise.wilcox.test call?
> 
> Many Thanks
> JP
> 
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-- 
Peter Dalgaard
Center for Statistics, Copenhagen Business School
Solbjerg Plads 3, 2000 Frederiksberg, Denmark
Phone: (+45)38153501
Email: pd.mes at cbs.dk  Priv: PDalgd at gmail.com