Statistical Consulting Laboratory
The Statistical Consulting Laboratory (SCL) is a statistical consulting service available to all members of the NJIT community, as well as to outside industrial clients.
The Statistical Consulting Laboratory (SCL) is operated through the Center for Applied Math and Statistics and is staffed by a team of faculty and graduate and undergraduate students in the Department of Mathematical Sciences.
You may contact the laboratory through the SCL Coordinator, Professor Ji Meng Loh.
What are the functions of the SCL?
- The SCL provides statistical advice and assistance with research proposal preparation and short-term statistical analysis to faculty and student researchers. This includes assistance with designing experiments, studies and surveys, as well as analyzing data.
- The SCL seeks to develop longer term, collaborative research efforts and promote cross-disciplinary interaction between SCL faculty and students and their counterparts in other disciplines, as well as with industrial researchers. It is anticipated that the SCL staff will work closely with the client, receiving recognition in resulting research reports and papers in the form of joint authorship or acknowledgments, as appropriate.
Certain activities, are NOT intended to be part of the SCL's function. These include:
- Answering questions concerning the mechanics of using university-wide statistical software or the client's personal statistical software.
- Data entry and data analysis for course-related projects.
The responsibility for performing the actual data analysis of any project rests with the client; the function of the SCL will be to advise the client on appropriate statistical methodology for the project and interpretation of results. When data analysis is performed by SCL personnel (other than in the context of a project involving some research component), it will be carried out on a negotiated contract basis.
- The SCL provides statistical advice and assistance with research proposal preparation and short-term statistical analysis to faculty and student researchers. This includes assistance with designing experiments, studies and surveys, as well as analyzing data.
- The SCL seeks to develop longer term, collaborative research efforts and promote cross-disciplinary interaction between SCL faculty and students and their counterparts in other disciplines, as well as with industrial researchers. It is anticipated that the SCL staff will work closely with the client, receiving recognition in resulting research reports and papers in the form of joint authorship or acknowledgments, as appropriate.
Certain activities, are NOT intended to be part of the SCL's function. These include:
- Answering questions concerning the mechanics of using university-wide statistical software or the client's personal statistical software.
- Data entry and data analysis for course-related projects.
The responsibility for performing the actual data analysis of any project rests with the client; the function of the SCL will be to advise the client on appropriate statistical methodology for the project and interpretation of results. When data analysis is performed by SCL personnel (other than in the context of a project involving some research component), it will be carried out on a negotiated contract basis.
SCL services are available to NJIT faculty, administrators, and students involved in research projects and to industrial clients outside the NJIT community.
Initial consultation is free for university clients. Our objective in this meeting is to provide some short-term advice for your immediate statistical needs while exploring the possibility of setting up a longer term association. After the initial consultation, members of the lab contributing their time to a particular project are expected to be reimbursed through release time or summer salary. Consulting projects involving substantial participation by members of the SCL, such as becoming involved with a university client's research grant proposal/investigation or consulting on projects for clients outside the university community will be charged on a negotiable contract basis.
To arrange an appointment, please contact Professor Ji Meng Loh via email. In your request, please include the following information:
- your name and contact information
- your status (Faculty, Staff, MS or PhD student, other)
- a brief description of the problem
- what you would like from the statistical consulting center (advice, collaboration, statistical services, other)
- your statistical background (courses taken, practical experience, experience with statistical packages, etc.)
Note: We do not have a drop-in or call-in service. We find that the most effective results occur when both researcher and statistician commit some time to working through a research problem together.
The majority of the initial appointment is typically spent describing (in non-statistical terms) your project/research to the statisticians and the particular aspects with which you may need assistance. Bringing materials such as:
- references related to your field which may familiarize the consultants with your research
- samples of questionnaires or any forms used for data collection
- some or all of the raw data (if possible)
- copies of any preliminary descriptive analyses of your data, including graphics (scatter plots, histograms, etc.)
- program documentation for questions about particular software programs
- fellow researchers, advisors, and/or collaborators to help develop and refine questions of interest
will likely be very valuable in the consulting session.
Initial appointments are scheduled to last an hour and are held in Cullimore Hall. After the initial consultation, the SCL Coordinator will decide how best to proceed. Possible options include handling the request himself, putting you in contact with the member(s) of the lab with the most expertise in the identified area, assigning the problem to a graduate student (with appropriate supervision), or terminating the consultation because of time constraints or insufficient expertise in the requested area.
The SCL, located in Cullimore Hall, has available Pentium PC's containing several statistical software packages, text-processing programs, and spreadsheet and database software. A postscript printer and a small selection of statistical reference books are also located in the lab. Additional computational resources are available through the facilities of CAMS.