try some correlation or regression analysis. any preliminary book on
statistics will help you.

======================
Always Learning
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Greetings:
I am fairly competent with Excel, but very much a novice with stastics.


To simplify my question, I present this hypothetical:

Suppose I want to know what factor or factors allow me to run a mile
under six minutes.
I have a spreadsheet with each row representing one day, because I run
the mile test once each day. For each row in column A I have input a
"1" if I ran under six minutes and a "0" if I did not.
I have 210 additional columns that reflect data such as:

In Column B I record how many hours of sleep I got that night.
In Column C I record what fruit I ate for breakfast that day.
In Column D I record whether I played ball with my kids.
In Column E I record the outside temperature.
In Column F I record how much water I drank for the day.
Etc.

At the end of the month I determine that I have run under 6 minutes on
18 of the 30 days. What I want is for Excel to tell me what factors
most led to success. For example, the program might reveal that on the
10 days that I ate bananas I ran well on 8 of those days. And further,
on 6 of the 7 days that I both ate bananas AND got eight hours sleep, I
ran well. Thus the highest percentage or correlation for successful
running was eating bananas AND getting eight hours sleep. The next
highest correlation was when I both drank a gallon of water AND it was
between 70 and 75 degrees.

Can I get this type of information? Keep in mind, for my worksheet I
have 210 columns per record, so there's not much space left to write
formulas. Are there any statistical add-in programs that would provide
this information better than Excel's capacity?

I hope that I have been sufficiently detailed.
Thank you in advance for the help!

A.L.


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Always Learning
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