STA1100S - Introductory Statistics

Course Outline:

This is an introductory statistics course aimed at exposing students to principles and tools to support appropriate quantitative analysis. The aim is to produce students with a functional sense of statistics. We introduce students to statistical modelling and also cover exploratory data analysis. Appropriate tools for display, analysis and interpretation of data are discussed. This course is offered predominantly, but not exclusively, to Commerce students. The aim is to give a foundation to students who will encounter and apply statistics in their other courses and professions. Topics covered include: Exploratory data analysis and summary statistics; probability theory; random variables; probability mass and density functions; binomial, Poisson, exponential, normal and uniform distributions; sampling distributions; confidence intervals; introduction to hypothesis testing (including various tests on means); determining sample sizes; simple linear regression and measures of correlation. Students are assessed on their knowledge of the topics covered and their ability to perform simple and appropriate statistical analyses using spreadsheet functions.