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

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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.

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Data availability

GEOstats is available to download at GitHub (https://github.com/mstgndz/GEOstats). Disk occupancy of GEOstats is approximately 14.5 MB, and it works on the Microsoft Windows versions with Excel.

Code availability

Codes used in GEOstats can be imported from GitHub at the public repositories: (1) Eigen values for a symmetric matrix (https://github.com/YoichiroUrita/Math) and (2) k-means algorithm for clustering (https://github.com/gpolic/kmeans-excel). The VBA codes (3.36 and 16.4 KB, respectively) have been provided as open access by their authors in 2018.

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Acknowledgements

The authors thank to the editor Dr. Hassan A. Babaie and two anonymous reviewers for their critical and constructive comments that improved the quality of this paper and software. The first author also thanks to Campus France for Scholarships to Foreign Students in France and Turkey’s Council of Higher Education for 100/2000 PhD Scholarship.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Graduate School of Natural Sciences, Muğla Sıtkı Koçman University, 48000, Muğla, Turkey

    Mesut Gündüz

  2. Faculty of Fundamental and Applied Sciences, Poitiers University, 86000, Poitiers, France

    Mesut Gündüz

  3. Geological Engineering Department, Konya Technical University, 42250, Konya, Turkey

    Kürşad Asan

Authors
  1. Mesut Gündüz
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  2. Kürşad Asan
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Contributions

M.G.: Software and Programming, Methodology, Conceptualization, Writing. K.A.: Methodology, Conceptualization, Writing, Supervision.

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Correspondence to Mesut Gündüz.

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Conflict of interest

The authors declare that they have no known competing financial interests or personal relationships that could have appeared to influence the work reported in this paper.

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Communicated by: H. Babaie

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Gündüz, M., Asan, K. GEOstats: an excel-based data analysis program applying basic principles of statistics for geological studies. Earth Sci Inform 15, 705–712 (2022). https://doi.org/10.1007/s12145-021-00710-6

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