33508 - Crash Course in Statistics

Academic Year 2017/2018

  • Teaching Mode: Traditional lectures
  • Campus: Forli
  • Corso: Second cycle degree programme (LM) in International relations and diplomatic affairs (cod. 8783)

Learning outcomes

At the end of the course, students will be provided with the basic statistical tools for analyzing and describing a set of data through graphical representations and summary measures, in both univariate and bivariate problems. Moreover, the students will be able to deal with: 1) basic tools of probability theory and its applications, 2) inferential methods of point and interval estimation and hypothesis testing.

Course contents

- Descriptive Statistics

Variables and types of variables. Frequency tables. Summary measures of position and dispersion. Standardization and bell-shaped distributions. Association of two quantitative variables, covariance and correlation coefficient. Outline of simple linear regression.


- Probability Theory

Random experiment, sample space and events. Conditional probability and independence. Random variables, cumulative distribution function and probability density function. Expected value and variance of a random variable. Discrete and continuous Uniform distribution, Bernoulli distribution, Chi-squared distribution and Gaussian distribution. Independent variables.

 

- Inferential Statistics

Random sampling and sampling distributions. Point estimation. Bias and mean squared error. Confidence intervals for the mean of a Gaussian population. The Student t distribution. Hypothesis testing on the mean of a Gaussian population. The p-value.

Teaching methods

Teacher's lectures.

Office hours

See the website of Marco Novelli