PSCI1801: Intro to Inferential Statistics

The first step of many data science sequences is to learn a great deal about how to work with individual data sets: cleaning, tidying, merging, describing and visualizing data. These are crucial skills in data analytics, but describing a data set is not our ultimate goal. The ultimate goal of data science is to make inferences about the world based on the small sample of data that we have.

PSCI 1801 shifts focus to this goal of inference. Using a methodology that emphasizes intuition and simulation over mathematics, this course will cover the key statistical concepts of probability, sampling, distributions, hypothesis testing, and covariance. The goal of the class is for students to ultimately have the knowledge and ability to perform, customize, and explain bivariate and multivariate regression. Students who have not taken PSCI-1800 should have basic familiarity with R, including working with vectors and matrices, basic summary statistics, visualizations, and for() loops.

Here is the course textbook.