Introduction

What is statistics?

Statistics is a branch of mathematical sciences that deals with collecting, organizing and summarizing information, and drawing conclusions about the population from which this information was extracted.

Statistics can be divided into two areas:

  • descriptive statistics
  • inferential statistics

Descriptive Statistics

This subject is concerned with collecting, organizing, and summarizing the information from the sample.

Inferential statistics

This subject is concerned with making educated guesses about the whole population based on the sample information with the help of probability.

What will we cover in this course?

The syllabus can be found here.

R

R is a free software (open software) that we will be using in this class. You can download it from
http://mirrors.ibiblio.org/pub/mirrors/CRAN/.

Here are some links to tutorials on R:

Excel/OpenOffice Spreadsheet software

We will be using a spreadsheet software. If you have Excel installed on your computer, you can use it. If you don't, you can download OpenOffice, a free software which has the same functionality for our purposes.

Here are some links to tutorials on Excel.

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