About this Course
Welcome to the course notes for STAT 504: Analysis of Discrete Data. 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.
This course is part of the Online Master of Applied Statistics program offered by Penn State's World Campus.
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Welcome to STAT 504 – Analysis of Discrete Data! Section
In this course, we'll learn basic principles and statistical methods relevant for the analysis of discrete and categorical responses. Typical examples include whether or not a "success" occurs, extent of agreement, and a count of some occurrence. Software, such as R and SAS, will be used for most of the computation, but the emphasis will be on understanding the concepts underlying those procedures and on interpreting the results.
Prerequisites and Review Resources Section
STAT 504 is an applied course intended for graduate students who have successfully completed at least two other graduate statistics courses. The prerequisite basically means that in order to succeed in STAT 504, you must have good understanding of the basic concepts such as populations and parameters, samples and statistics, confidence intervals, and hypothesis tests, and how to fit and interpret regression type models. Being familiar with matrix algebra is a plus as well.
For an introduction to R or SAS software, please see
For other statistical software see our Statistical Software page for more information.