smovie

Some Movies to Illustrate Concepts in Statistics

What does smovie do?

The smovie package provides movies to help students to understand statistical concepts. The rpanel package is used to create interactive plots that move to illustrate key statistical ideas and methods. The movies cover the topics of probability distributions; sampling distributions of the mean (central limit theorem), the maximum (extremal types theorem) and the (Fisher transformation of the) correlation coefficient; simple linear regression; hypothesis testing.

An example

The function wws produces a movie to visualise the Wald, Wilks and score likelihood-based test statistics, for a model with a scalar unknown parameter. The user can change the value of the parameter under a simple null hypothesis and observe the effect on the test statistics. The following code uses the log-likelihood from a binomial experiment and considers the null hypothesis that the success probability θ is equal to θ0. The user may specify their own log-likelihood.

wws(theta0 = 0.5)

Installation

To get the current released version from CRAN:

install.packages("smovie")

Note that rpanel requires the Tcl extension BWidget. BWidget is included in the R installers for Windows and macOS. For other platforms please see Section 1.1.7 of Writing R Extensions for installation advice.

Vignettes

See vignette("smovie-vignette", package = "smovie") for an overview of the package.