Introduction
Statistics is the collection, display, and analysis of data; it is the art of making wise decisions in the face of uncertainty. The purpose of this class is to teach you how to think critically about data, how it was collected and analyzed, and its uses in addressing interesting questions. Some of the issues we will touch on are:
- How should experiments be designed to measure the effects of new treatments (medical or other)?
- What causes the resemblance between parents and children, and how strong is that force?
- Why does a casino make a profit at roulette?
- How can the Gallup poll predict election results so accurately using samples of only a few thousand people?
- How can we tell if medical treatments or other interventions really work or if the results we observe are simply due to chance error?
- How can we tell if sex bias or race bias has occurred?
- Along the way you will learn some basic techniques that statisticians (and many non-statisticians) use to visualize and summarize data, some methods for determining what can be due to chance and what cannot, and the limitations as well as the value of these procedures. You will also learn about some interesting applications of probability models to, for example, genetics, and how the great statistician R.A. Fisher was able to show that the results of some of the earliest experiments in genetics were probably “made-up.”
