STATS 1004 - Statistical Practice I (Life Sciences)

Statistical ideas and methods are essential tools in virtually all areas that rely on data to make decisions and reach conclusions. This includes diverse fields such as science, technology, government, commerce, manufacturing and the life sciences. In broad terms, statistics is about getting information from data. This includes both the important question of how to obtain suitable data for a given purpose and also how best to extract the information, often in the presence of random variability. This course provides an introduction to the contemporary application of statistics to a range of real world situations. It has a strong practical focus using the statistical package R to analyse real data relevant to the life sciences. Topics covered are: organisation, description and presentation of data in the life sciences; design of experiments and surveys; random variables, probability distributions, the binomial distribution and the normal distribution; statistical inference, tests of significance, confidence intervals; inference for means and proportions, one-sample tests, two independent samples, paired data, t-tests, contingency tables; analysis of variance; linear regression, least squares estimation, residuals and transformations, inference for regression coefficients, prediction.