GEOstats: an excel-based data analysis program applying basic principles of statistics for geological studies

Abstract

Statistical evaluation of the data collected from field and laboratory is an important task in the earth sciences. The aim of a geological study is to reveal a scientific result from the earth, but the conclusions must be based on the analytical inferences, as in natural and engineering sciences. Therefore, the importance of data analysis increases depending on the improvement of technological methods in geology. The purpose of data analysis in geology is to examine the rate at which a feature changes within the population. The geological data may be lithological, textural (e.g. grain size and shape), structural (e.g. bedding, fault, foliation, jointing or lineation etc.) and chemical (e.g. major and trace elements, isotope ratios etc.) measurements of the rock, mineral, fossil, soil or water specimens. GEOstats is an excel-based data analysis program that provides graphical and numerical results, and data simulation/statistical modeling (e.g. simple regression analysis, box plot, Q-Q plot, XYZ plot, sample distribution and classification) of samples representing a population for geologists and other researchers as well. The program can perform both simple data analysis (e.g. basic statistical calculations) of numerical results and highly complex multivariate analysis such as cluster analysis, principal component analysis and common factor analysis . GEOstats is also able to carry out the error bars analysis by using relative standard deviation values for different confidence intervals.