STATISTICAL SIMULATION ON MICROCOMPUTERS

The statistical simulation program DATASIM is designed to conduct large-scale sampling experiments on microcomputers. Monte Carlo procedures are used to investigate the Type I and Type II error rates for statistical tests when one or more assumptions are systematically violated-assumptions, for example, regarding normality, homogeneity of variance or covariance, mini-mum expected cell frequencies, and the like. In the present paper, we report several initial tests of the data-generating algorithms employed by DATASIM. The results indicate that the uniform and standard normal deviate generators perform satisfactorily. Furthermore, Kolmogorov-Smirnov tests show that the sampling distributions of z, t, F, χ 2, and r generated by DATASIM simulations follow the appropriate theoretical distributions. Finally, estimates of Type I error rates obtained by DATASIM under various patterns of violations of assumptions are in close agreement with the results of previous analytical and empirical studies; These converging lines of evidence suggest that DATASIM may well prove to be a reliable and productive tool for conducting statistical simulation research. © 1990 Psychonomic Society, Inc.