Statistics 50 Course Outline

This course roughly divides into four segments. We will cover approximately one chapter each lecture (that's 3 chapters per week.) Below is a rough outline. Changes may be made during the quarter.
  1. Collecting and Describing Data
    ``Garbage in, garbage out;SPMquot; applies to more than software; it's also true of science that if the data are poor, the conclusions will also be suspect. What, then, constitutes good data? And how do you summarize this data once you've collected it?
    1. Chapter 1, Controlled Experiments
    2. Chapter 2, Observational Studies
    3. Chapter 3, The Histogram
    4. Chapter 4, The Average and the Standard Deviation
    5. Chapter 5, The Normal Approximation for Data
  2. Probability
    Probability is the foundation of Statistics. We'll talk about how chance interferes with our observations, and explore some properties of the laws of chance.
    1. Chapter 6, Measurement Error
    2. Chapter 13, What are the Chances?
    3. Chapter 14, More about Chance
    4. Chapter 16, The Law of Averages
    5. Chapter 17, The Expected Value and Standard Error
    6. REVIEW
    7. MIDTERM I
    8. Chapter 18, The Normal Approximation for Probabability Histograms
  3. Inference
    Does smoking cause lung cancer? Is the ``protease cocktail" an effective treatment for AIDS? Is the mean global temperature rising? These are all examples of inference based on data, and we'll cover some basic inference techniques.
    1. Chapter 19, Sample Surveys
    2. Chapter 20, Chance Errors in Sampling
    3. Chapter 21, The Accuracy of Percentages
    4. Chapter 23, The Accuracy of Averages
    5. chapter 26, Tests of Significance
    6. Chapter 27, More Tests for Averages
    7. Chapter 28, The chi-squared-Test
    8. Chapter 29, A Closer Look at Tests of Significance
    9. Chapter 8, Correlation
    10. REVIEW
    11. MIDTERM II
    12. Chapter 9, More about Correlation
    13. Chapter 10, Regression
    14. Chapter 11, The RMS Error for Regression
    15. Chapter 12, The Regression Line
    16. REVIEW for final
  4. FINAL, June 9, 11:30 am.