Statistics IB 1997 This material is provided for students, supervisors (and others) to freely use in connection with this course. Copyright remains with the author.

Statistics IB
1997

picture of a linear regression A linear regression

This is a home page for a course of 16 lectures to second year Cambridge mathematics students during 8 weeks in winter 1997. Lectures took place on Mondays and Thursdays at 9am.

Each lecture is as self-contained as possible and has course notes of four A4 pages.

I have also made additional notes about things I said in lectures and questions students have asked.

There is a single examples sheet and a file of exam questions. Students should receive three supervisions on the examples sheet. There are four recommended books. If you enjoy this course then you should consider related courses in Part II and other items of interest.

Course notes

How to view and print: There are ... pages of notes available as a postscript file. When you click on a file name below, the file will appear on your screen to be viewed with ghostview. You can mark and print the specific pages you need, rather than waste paper by printing all the pages. Ideally, you will want to print to a 600 dpi laser printer, but 300 dpi will do.

The notes are formatted as two side-by-side pages per A4 sheet. So to view the notes properly you may need to go to the ghostview menus and set the display for A4 paper in landscape mode. Each lecture begins on a new page.

There are individual files for each lecture. This may be more convenient for you if you do not have the ability to run ghostscript from your computer, but are able to print a postscript file.

Corrections: Whenever I find an error in the notes the files above are corrected and a note is added to this list of corrections. These corrections should be applied to the notes handed out in lecture. They have been encorporated to the version of the notes above. Here is a postscript file also giving the corrections: corrections.ps

Where to collect photocopies of the notes: I always try to bring copies of the previous lecture's notes to each lecture. Otherwise, you can find copies of notes by using this map to locate the Statistical Laboratory pigeonholes.

Examples sheet

There are three examples sheets; each is a postscript files of 2 pages. The questions appear in the same order as topics are covered in lectures and you will find a recommendation on the sheet concerning the work you should do for your supervisions. Viewing and printing is identical as for the notes above.

Here are some old examples sheets from when the course was lectured in 1995:

Corrections: Whenever I find an error in the notes the files above are corrected and a note is added to this list of corrections.

Overhead Slides and Digressions

I include a small (non-examinable) digression half way through each lecture. Topics I have covered are:

  1. Anchoring and bias. (lecture 1)
  2. A method of conducting a questionaire about a sensitive topic. (lecture 2)
  3. How many words did Shakespeare know? (lecture 3)
  4. A confidence interval for the remaining life of the human race. (lecture 4)
  5. Utility and lotteries. (lecture 5)
  6. The Alias paradox. (lecture 6)
  7. The Ellsberg paradox. (lecture 7)
  8. An estimation game. (lecture 8)
  9. A statistical love story. (lecture 9)
  10. Benford's distribution for the leading digit. (lecture 10)
  11. An analysis of Jane Austin's style. (lecture 11)
  12. Latin squares and experimental design. (lecture 12)
  13. The Stein estimator. (lecture 13)
  14. Factor analysis and the Myers-Briggs test. (Lecture 14)
  15. Discriminant analysis, principal components, bootstrap. (Lecture 15)
These examples and other material are included in this file of overhead projector slides. There is another file of overheads that I used with lectures. This is mostly larger scale displays of information that is in the notes. However, there are scatter plots and regression lines with confidence bands for which there was not enough space to reproduce in notes.

Additional material

Here are some additional notes which summarise things I said in lectures and which do not appear in the printed notes. I have also made notes about questions that students asked, either in lectures or by coming up to me afterwards.

Exam questions

Here is a file of past exam questions. Presently this file has 34 questions in total (from 1988-1996).

Recommended books

  1. M. H. De Groot, Probability and Statistics, 2nd edition, Addison-Wesley, 1986.
  2. J. A. Rice, Mathematical Statistics and Data Analysis, 2nd edition, Duxbury Press, 1994.
  3. G. Casella and J. O. Berger, Statistical Inference, Brooks Cole, 1990.
  4. D. A. Berry and B. W. Lindgren, Statistics, Theory and Methods, Brooks Cole, 1990 (out of print).

Related courses in Part II

There are courses in Part II that build on what students learn in this course.

In Part IIA there is Computational Statistics and Statistical Modelling.

In Part IIB there is Statistical Inference.

Other items of interest

Feedback

To provide this information via this WWW page is an experiment. I welcome your feedback as to whether it a useful addition to the lecture course.

Click here to send me email with comments or corrections on my lectures, the notes or the examples sheet.

Notice to external persons accessing this page

Please click here.

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Richard Weber ( r.r.weber@statslab.cam.ac.uk )

Last modified: Thu Jan 15 09:30:12 1998