STAT 100 | Statistical Concepts and Reasoning

About

Welcome to the course notes for STAT 100: Statistical Concepts and Reasoning. These notes are designed and developed by Penn State’s Department of Statistics and offered as open educational resources. These notes are free to use under Creative Commons license CC BY-NC 4.0.

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If you are a current student in this course, please see Canvas for your syllabus, assignments, lesson videos, and communication from your instructor.

Contributors

These materials have been recently revised by Dr. Dennis Pearl, as well as Scott Kresge and Eli Walters. Earlier authors include Dr. Megan Romer and Dr. Patricia Buchanan.

Course Overview

Statistics is the art and science of using sample data to understand something about the world (or a population) in the context of uncertainty. It is the science of learning from data.

A flowchart. Data is gathered from a sample of a population to explore an idea.
The
'BIG PICTURE'
of Statistics
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Population
Population
Sample
Sample

Gather Data

Take a representative sample from the population.

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Question or Idea?

What do we want to know about a population?

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Descriptive Statistics

Describe the sample data numerically and visually.

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Inferential Statistics

Test a hypothesis, estimate a value or examine a relationship in the sample data to make inferences about the population.

 

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Fig 1: The ‘Big Picture’ of Statistics

Lessons