Lectures: Stat 203 Fall 2016

August 29, 2016

Today, we had an introductory discussion and greetings, then discussed our syllabus, and finally covered the first two chapter of The Data Professor's Guide to Basic Statistics.
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: I plan to discuss the projects and cover chapters 3-7 of The Data Professor's Guide to Basic Statistics. (Chapters 6 and 7 will be passed out on Wednesday.)

Today, we reviewed the first two chapters of The Data Professor's Guide to Basic Statistics, then continued with that document until Distributions.
Homework: I passed out and we worked on Homework 1, due September 7, 2016.
Reading: Moore, McCabe, Craig, pp. 1-8.
Next class: We did not discuss projects today, and I meant to, so we will do that tomorrow. Then we will review Concepts of structured data. Kinds of variables, and Distributions of The Data Professor's Guide to Basic Statistics, do two more homeworks, then continue with Exploratory data analysis from the same document.

Today we covered displaying distributions with pie charts, bar graphs, stemplots, and histograms. We also covered Exploratory data analysis from The Data Professor's Guide to Basic Statistics.
Homework: We worked on Homework 2, due September 8, 2016.
Homework: I also passed out, but did not yet assign Homework 3, due September 7, 2016.
Reading: Moore, McCabe, Craig, pp. 9-23
Next class: We are going to continue our study of exploratory data analysis and graphing distributions with a laboratory exercise involving a diamonds data set. Then 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.

Today we reviewed the concept of a histogram with the new material being the meaning of the axes. 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. If F(x) = "proportion of observations less than x (in the limit of many observations)" then the density is the derivative of F. Finally, we discussed skewed and symmetric distributions, tails, center and spread, unimodal, multimodal, and bimodal distributions. We also discussed mean and median, quantiles, and percentiles.
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