This text follows scope and sequence requirements of a one-semester introduction to statistics course and is geared toward students majoring in fields other than math or engineering. The text assumes some knowledge of intermediate algebra and focuses on statistics application over theory. Introductory Statistics includes innovative practical applications that make the text relevant and accessible, as well as collaborative exercises, technology integration problems, and statistics labs.
- Included in this chapter are the basic ideas and words of probability and statistics. You will soon understand that statistics and probability work together. You will also learn how data are gathered and what "good" data can be distinguished from "bad."
- In this chapter, you will study numerical and graphical ways to describe and display your data. This area of statistics is called "Descriptive Statistics." You will learn how to calculate, and even more importantly, how to interpret these measurements and graphs.
- Probability theory is concerned with probability, the analysis of random phenomena. The central objects of probability theory are random variables, stochastic processes, and events: mathematical abstractions of non-deterministic events or measured quantities that may either be single occurrences or evolve over time in an apparently random fashion.
- In this chapter, you will study the normal distribution, the standard normal distribution, and applications associated with them. The normal distribution has two parameters (two numerical descriptive measures), the mean ( μμ ) and the standard deviation ( σσ ).
- In a population whose distribution may be known or unknown, if the size (n) of samples is sufficiently large, the distribution of the sample means will be approximately normal. The mean of the sample means will equal the population mean. The standard deviation of the distribution of the sample means, called the standard error of the mean, is equal to the population standard deviation divided by the square root of the sample size (n).
- In this chapter, you will learn to construct and interpret confidence intervals. You will also learn a new distribution, the Student's-t, and how it is used with these intervals. Throughout the chapter, it is important to keep in mind that the confidence interval is a random variable. It is the population parameter that is fixed.
- You have learned to conduct hypothesis tests on single means and single proportions. You will expand upon that in this chapter. You will compare two means or two proportions to each other. To compare two means or two proportions, you work with two groups. The groups are classified either as independent or matched pairs.
- Regression analysis is a statistical process for estimating the relationships among variables and includes many techniques for modeling and analyzing several variables. When the focus is on the relationship between a dependent variable and one or more independent variables.
- For hypothesis tests comparing averages between more than two groups, statisticians have developed a method called "Analysis of Variance" (abbreviated ANOVA). In this chapter, you will study the simplest form of ANOVA called single factor or one-way ANOVA. You will also study the FF distribution, used for one-way ANOVA, and the test of two variances. This is just a very brief overview of one-way ANOVA.