Description

This course presents students with basic concepts in statistics and probability, and encourages statistical thinking. This course is intended to bring students to a level where they can carry out simple statistical analysis of simple data. Topics covered include descriptive statistics, probability, discrete and continuous random variables, the sampling distribution and the Central Limit Theorem. The R statistical programming environment is used for computation, graphical presentation, and simulations. The emphasis in the course is on the presentation of statistical methods and on the interpretation of the outcome. The philosophy of statistics, and not its mathematics, is at the center of this course; needed mathematical concepts are demonstrated via simulations rather than by abstract proofs.