Lectures: Stat 202 Fall 2016

August 29, 2016

• Today, we had an introductory discussion and greetings, then discussed our syllabus.
• Reading: Please read about the optional extra credit opportunities in our syllabus.
• Reading: Please read the first few chapters of The Data Professor's Guide to Basic Statistics, which is linked here and also passed out during class.
• Next class: we will discuss the projects and cover the first 5 chapters of The Data Professor's Guide to Basic Statistics, but we will probably not cover all 5 chapters on Wednesday.

August 31, 2016

• Today, we started class by discussing projects, then we continued with the following chapters from The Data Professor's Guide to Basic Statistics: Defining familiar terms, Let's collect some data!, Concepts of Structured Data. I gave a brief introduction to the next chapter Kinds of variables, but did not cover it yet.
• Reading: Please read Kinds of variables in The Data Professor's Guide to Basic Statistics.
• Next class: We will cover the next 3 chapters in The Data Professor's Guide to Basic Statistics, including two additional chapters which I will hand out in class. These chapters will also include homework.

September 1, 2016

• Today, we covered Kinds of variables and Distributions in The Data Professor's Guide to Basic Statistics. We covered bar graphs, pie charts and stemplots for visualizing distributions. We touched on histograms (also for visualizing distributions) but have not covered them in detail.
• Homework: I passed out and we worked on Homework 1, due September 8, 2016.
• Homework: I passed out and we worked on Homework 2, due September 8, 2016.
• Homework: I passed out but did not yet assign Homework 3. Due date to be added later.
• Reading: Moore, McCabe, Craig, pp 1-15.
• Next class: We will review the concept of a distribution and its relationship to the kinds of graphs we are creating. We will talk in detail about histograms while considering the call center data set. We will cover Exploratory data analysis from The Data Professor's Guide to Basic Statistics. Homework 3 will be assigned, but instead of working on histogram homework in class we will do a laboratory exercise on a diamonds data set. Finally, if there is time, we will proceed to talk about summary statistics (mean, median, quartiles, percentiles, 5 number summary, standard deviation) and the box plot and modified box plot.

September 7, 2016

• Today we reviewed the concept of distribution. We went over histograms, working together to analyze the call center data set. We talked about the axes of the histogram: the x-axis is the range of the values of the quantitative variable whose distribution is being visualized. This range can be restricted by adjusting the "where" input in StatCrunch. There are 3 choices for the y-axis in StatCrunch: frequency (the count of observations in each bin), the relative frequency (the proportion of observations in each bin) and the density. The point of the density was to have a vertical scale which is independent of the number of observations and bin width. Finally, we worked together to analyze the diamonds data set.
• Homework: Homework 1 is due next class, September 8, 2016.
• Homework: Homework 2 is due next class, September 8, 2016.
• Homework: Homework 3 is now assigned with a due date of September 14, 2016.
• Practice Problems: Practice Problems for Week 1.
• Reading: Moore, McCabe & Craig, pp. 30-36.
• Next class: We will discuss skewed and symmetric distributions, tails, center and spread, unimodal, multimodal, and bimodal distributions. We also will discus mean and median, quantiles, and percentiles, resistant to outliers versus sensitive to outliers. We will continue our tour of summary statistics with the 5-number summary and the related box plot and modified box plots, we will pass out homework 4 and 5, talk about the sample standard deviation, and transformations. Then, if there is time we will proceed to talk about sampling -- to understand Bessel's correction in the definition of sampling standard deviation, but also because it is one of the primary course objectives.

September 8, 2016

• Today, we discussed skewed and symmetric distributions, tails, center and spread, unimodal, multimodal, and bimodal distributions. We also discused mean and median, quantiles, and percentiles, resistant to outliers versus sensitive to outliers. We also continued our tour of summary statistics with the 5-number summary and the related box plot and modified box plots.
• Homework: Homework 3 was already assigned with a due date of September 14, 2016.
• Practice Problems Solutions: Practice Problem Solutions for Week 1.
• Reading: Moore, McCabe & Craig, pp. 37-42.
• Next class: We will quickly review measures of center and spread, 5 number summary, box plot and modified box plot. We will cover transformations. We will have class time for Homeworks 4 and 5. We will cover standard deviation and start to study sampling.