How to Use Statistics (Smarter Study Skills)

✍ Scribed by Steve Lakin

• Publisher: Prentice Hall
• Year: 2011
• Tongue: English
• Leaves: 300
• Category: Library

✦ Synopsis

Statistics is arguably the main means through which maths appears in non-maths courses. So many students across a broad range of disciplines encounter statistics, in most cases unexpectedly so, and will need to brush up their skills in order to research, analyse and present their data effectively. Topics such as such as methods of presentation, distributions, confidence limits and so on appear very often – and almost every course involves analysis of data at some point.

De-mystifying the basics for even the most maths-terrified of students, this book will inspire confident and accurate use of statistics for non-maths courses.

✦ Table of Contents

Cover
How to use Statistics
Contents
Preface and acknowledgements
How to use this book
A note on mathematics, rounding, calculators and computer software
Introductory statistics
Introduction to statistics and data
Presentation of data
Averages
Cumulative frequencies and percentiles
Measures of dispersion
Working with frequency distributions
Essential mathematics
Factorials, permutations and combinations
Sigma notation
Correlation and regression
Correlation
Linear regression
Probability
An introduction to probability
Multiple probabilities
Probability trees
Expected values and decision criteria
Conditional probability
Probability distributions
Introduction to probability distributions
The Poisson distribution
The normal distribution
The binomial distribution
Hypothesis testing
Introduction to hypothesis testing
z-tests
t-tests
X2-tests
Statistical tables
Table A The normal distribution N(0,1)
Table B Critical values and confidence limits for the z-test
Table C1 The one-tailed t-test
Table C2 The two-tailed t-test
Table D Critical values for the X2 distribution
Table E1 Critical values for the F-test (5%)
Table E2 Critical values for the F-test (1%)
Summary, glossary and appendices
Summary and further work
Glossary
Appendix 1 ‘Use of a calculator’ test
Appendix 2 The Greek alphabet
Appendix 3 Some useful Excel commands
Solutions to exercises