STAT 319: Applied Statistics in Science

Spring 2013

Syllabus Lectures Computing Assignments Readings Calendar Announcement

The purpose of the reading is to help you get more sense about how statistics are applied. I don't require you to understand every piece of mathematics contents in the paper. However, I do require you to understand what the procedures are taken to tackle a problem in statistics. For each of the paper, I will give detail instruction about how to read the paper. And I will give less instruction later when I think it's time for you to determine what the important content is. I probably will assign the same reading a second round if you have more knowledge to understand some more bit of content as the course going on.

For each paper,

Read it ! Study it! Get to know it! Take notes of it! Learn how to summarize the statistical ideas it contains! Discuss with your classmates! Put it under your pillow at night if you have to! (from our Prof. Hunter)

Get articles: You can obtain these articles online through the Penn State library site: Go to http://www.libraries.psu.edu/psul/home.html and click on the E-journals link. Then type in the journal name. When the list of journals appears, find the journal we need. Click its title or the "get it" button, at which point you'll be asked for the year, volume, issue, and start page of the article. Sometimes, you can directly search the journal by type in the name in Google search and download it when you are in the campus.

[Reading 1] Are the Digits of \(\pi\) an Independent and Identically Distributed Sequence?
- Source: The American Statistician, Vol. 54, No. 1 (Feb., 2000), pp. 12-16
- Instructions: This paper tests iid hypothesis for the digits of \(\pi\). How iid is defined in the paper? Several different tests are mentioned in the paper. What are their conclusions?
[Video 1] TED talk by David McCandless: The beauty of data visualization
- View here
- Learn more about the speaker
[Reading 2] Vehicle Safety Standard Update: A Case Study in a Regulatory Debate Using Statistical Models
- Source: Chance, Vol. 25, Issue 4, 2012, pp. 4-12
- Downloadable link if in campus
[Video 2] TED talk by Hans Rosling: Stats that reshape your world-view
- View here
- Gapminder
[Video 3] Hypothesis tests, p-value - Statistics Help
- View here
- Much enjoyable than reading the book! Should definitely watch it!
[Reading 3] Online material about Hypothesis Testing
- Html version
- Pdf version
[Video 4] Youtube: How To Calculate and Understand Analysis of Variance (ANOVA) F Test.
[Reading 4] Simpson's Paradox: A Cautionary Tale in Advanced Analytics.
- Steve Berman, Leandro DalleMule, Michael Greene, John Lucker , Significance
- A short intro: This article uses lots of examples to illustrate the Simpsons Paradox. After the paper, it also includes the information of the authors. They are all advanced analyst. It would also give you some sense of the application of stat models.