The Stratum blog

Statistics, visualized — one post at a time

How-tos, worked case studies, plain-language statistics explainers, and product news. The written companion to our video series — new posts every week.

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Latest posts

How-To

How to Make a Q-Q Plot (Mac & Windows)

Check whether your data is normal — read the line, spot skew and tails.

Comparisons

Stratum vs SPSS

Where SPSS's established workflows fit, and where a lighter native app wins on cost.

How-To

How to Build a Decision Tree (Mac & Windows)

An interpretable model: grow it, prune it, read importance, and predict.

Statistics Explained

Violin vs Box Plot: Which Should You Use?

Both compare groups, but one shows summaries and the other shows shape.

How-To

How to Make a Violin Plot (Mac & Windows)

Compare groups by full distribution shape — and spot bimodality a box plot hides.

Comparisons

Stratum vs GraphPad Prism

Where Prism's biostatistics focus shines, and where a broader native app fits.

How-To

How to See Every Variable Pair at Once

See every variable pair at once with the Scatter chart's Matrix mode.

Statistics Explained

How to Read a Correlation Matrix

Read every pair's relationship at once, with the significant ones highlighted.

Statistics Explained

Reading Regression Diagnostics

R², VIF, Cook's distance and residual plots — whether to believe the model.

How-To

How to Run a Linear Regression (Mac & Windows)

Build a model from menus, read R² and coefficients, and check the diagnostics.

Comparisons

Stratum vs JMP

Where JMP's depth is worth it, and where a lighter native Mac app wins.

Statistics Explained

Understanding PCA Loadings & Scores

Loadings tell you what a component means; scores tell you where each observation sits.

How-To

How to Run PCA (Mac & Windows)

Reduce many variables to a few components; read the scree plot and biplot.

Case Studies

The Penguin Paradox: How to Tell Three Species Apart When the Average Lies

344 real penguins, a bill correlation that runs backwards until you split by species, then a decision tree, random forest and PCA that classify three species at ~98% — no code.

Case Studies

The Gap That Closed: 142 Countries, 55 Years, One Chart

Turn the most famous scatter in statistics into 142 connected trajectories and watch the development gap close — a full Gapminder analysis, no code, no animation.

Case Studies

The Star Wars Map: A Whole Survey in One Chart

1,186 people, 14 characters, one chart. Correspondence Analysis maps a whole survey — and Jar Jar sits alone in the corner. No code.

Case Studies

The Diamond Paradox: Why “Better” Diamonds Cost Less

53,940 real diamonds, three quality grades that all run backwards, and the charts, ANOVA, regression, PCA and decision tree that crack it — no code.

Case Studies

Does the Drug Work? It Depends Who You Ask

2,139 patients in the ACTG 175 HIV trial: the overall average said the drug worked, one arm said it harmed, and the honest answer lived in the subgroups — paired t-test, effect size, responder rate, ANOVA, MANOVA and ANCOVA. No code.

Case Studies

In Control AND Capable: The Number That Passes a Failing Process

A capability report says Ppk 1.36 — a pass. On 200 real piston-ring measurements, SPC control charts catch the drift that single number hides. The Six-Sigma rule: control before capability. No code.

Statistics Explained

What Is a Control Chart? SPC & the Nelson Rules

How SPC tells ordinary variation from a real change — and what the Nelson rules detect.

How-To

How to Build a Control Chart (Mac & Windows)

I-MR and X-bar charts with control limits and automatic Nelson-rule flagging.

Comparisons

Best Statistics Software for Mac & Windows (2026)

Native apps vs Excel vs R/Python vs the big suites — an honest map of the options.

Statistics Explained

Correlation vs Causation: Pearson vs Spearman

What correlation does and doesn't mean, and when to use Pearson vs Spearman.

How-To

How to Make a Scatter Plot (Mac & Windows)

Plot two variables, add a line of best fit, and read the correlation.

Statistics Explained

Mean vs Median: Which Should You Report?

Two measures of center that agree for symmetric data and diverge for skewed data.

Product Updates

What's New in Stratum 1.1

Two new Pro analyses, Connected Scatter, custom categorical ordering, skewness & kurtosis, and drag-to-export cards.

How-To

How to Make a Histogram (Mac & Windows)

See the shape of a variable — pick bins, read skew, and export.

Comparisons

Stratum vs Excel for Statistical Analysis

Where Excel runs out of road for real statistics — and what a native Mac app does differently.

Statistics Explained

ANOVA Assumptions Explained

Normality, equal variance, independence — what each assumption means and how to check it.

How-To

How to Run a One-Way ANOVA (Mac & Windows)

Compare three or more group means, read F and p, and run a Tukey post-hoc.

How-To

How to Run a t-Test (Mac & Windows) — Without R or Python

Compare two groups and read the result in under a minute — no code, no notebooks.

Statistics Explained

Box Plots Explained: Quartiles, IQR & Outliers

Median, quartiles, the IQR box, whiskers and outliers — read a box plot at a glance.

How-To

How to Make a Box Plot (Mac & Windows)

Compare groups and spot outliers with a box-and-whisker plot — in under a minute.

Product Updates

Introducing Stratum: Serious Statistics, Native to Mac & Windows

What Stratum is, who it's for, and why we built a native statistics app for the Mac.

More coming
Every week

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