A Data Analysis Method and Its Applications in EXCEL

Abstract

Data analysis is a quite important process and has been extensively employed in many areas. Especially in statistics, the distribution type test of data often needs to be handled. This paper presents that linear regression as a type of universal method can be applied to the distribution type test. In reliability engineering due to the failure data is commonly of non-linear relationship so that the linear regression method can not be directly employed. This difficulty can be resolved through linear transformation. Aimed for the linearization procedure of four kind of typical distributions, e.g., exponential distribution, normal distribution, logarithmic normal distribution and twoparameter Weibull distribution, their transformations are respectively different. After linearization transformations, correlation coefficients had been used as a criterion to choose the most matched distribution type. This method can be conveniently operated in MS EXCEL. Several samples and experiments illustrated the detailed transformation and the efficiency than other methods.