Statistics and Data Analysis

Statistics is an essential part of many disciplines in science and humanities. The purpose of this year-long course is to provide students with a basic understanding of statistics, giving them the ability to describe various populations, and draw inferences about them. It should also sharpen individual intuition about how to read data, interpret data, and judge others' claims about data. This course should be useful to a wide variety of students, preparing them for more advanced courses, as well as aiding in both academic and professional advancement. In this course students will investigate methods and concepts in statistics, covering the following broad themes: exploring and presenting data, sampling and experimentation, anticipating patterns, and statistical inference. The skills to be developed include the ability to characterize population data intuitively for oneself and others, to draw conclusions and novel inferences from population data, to check assumptions of others' claims and debug their reputed "facts", to look for causation while controlling for confounding effects, and to demystify the process of inquiry into what is not known. Please note that students who have taken OMSB9, Methodology of Science – Biology, may consider this course as a continuation of the elementary statistics studied in the course.