Module Information

1. STATISTICAL DIAGRAMS. Pie charts; simple multiple and stacked bar charts; histograms; cumulative polygons; stem and leaf diagrams.
2. SUMMARY MEASURES. Minimum, maximum, median, quartiles, percentiles; five number summaries and box-and-whisker plots; mean and mode; variance and standard deviation; calculations from grouped data.
3. SCATTERPOLTS, REGRESSION AND CORRELATION. Scatterplots; the idea of a line of best fit; importance of the mean point; least squares regression; the existence of two regression lines for bivariate data; correlation and its measurement; the (product moment) correlation coefficient; Spearman’s rank correlation.
4. PROBABILITY. Definition and properties; unions and intersections; mutually exclusive events; the addition law; independent events; the multiplication law; equally likely outcomes; conditional probability; Bayes’s theorem; the Central Limit theorem; the Normal distribution.
5. STATISTICAL INFERENCE. Basic ideas; informal inference based on two standard deviations; formal p-values; goodness of fit; the idea of a confidence interval.
6. TIME SERIES DATA. Plotting time series; the idea of a moving average; smoothing.
The computer package MINITAB: introduction, producing and interpreting diagrams and tables, producing and interpreting summary measures; regression and correlation; output from formal procedures such as z-,t-,chi-squared- and F-tests.