Statistics in Society

STAT 2420SED

Course Guide

STAT 2420SED

Course Guide

Statistics in Society

Course Start Date

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Course Level

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Length in Terms

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Credits

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Fees ($) (including lab fees)

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Future Terms

Quota and Schedule

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Quota and Schedule

Course Coordinator:

Dr Shirley Xueli Chen, BSc (SYSU), PhD (CityU)

Course Developer:

Dr Wilson Chan

This course teaches the elementary statistical analysis techniques that can be used to investigate a variety of applications of statistics in everyday life. This course emphasises the use of statistical ideas for making decisions and engaging in exploratory data analysis and basic statistical inference. Working with preset Excel worksheets and data sets will provide you with practical training for data analysis and for meeting everyday life requirements.

STAT 2420SED has no required courses as prerequisites.

Aims

This course aims to:

introduce the general concepts of data production, data analysis and statistical inference to draw conclusions about the important parameters of the underlying population;
provide a simple, yet critical, introduction to exploratory data analysis and statistical reasoning;
introduce a wide diversity of applications of statistics in everyday-life problems; and
explore the use of computing technology to perform statistical data analysis.

Contents

The course consists of seven study units:

Unit 1 Data analysis and descriptive statistics
Unit 2 Measuring chance and probability
Unit 3 Sampling distribution of the sample mean and confidence intervals
Unit 4 Hypothesis tests for one population mean
Unit 5 Hypothesis tests for two population means
Unit 6 Categorical data analysis
Unit 7 Relationships and regression analysis

Learning support

There will be seven supplementary lectures and seven tutorials provided for this course. All lectures and tutorials will be two-hour sessions. Although the lectures and tutorials are not compulsory, you are strongly advised to attend.

Assessment

The course contains continuous assessment and a final examination. Their respective weightings are 30% and 70% of the course score.

Continuous assessment consists of four assignments, of which one of them is a multiple-choice assignment and the other three are tutor-marked assignments. Students are required to submit assignments via the Online Learning Environment (OLE).

The three-hour final examination will be closed-book, with the exception of the Course Formula Booklet and Statistical Tables. You will be allowed to bring a calculator into the examination room, but only HKMU-approved models. A list of approved calculator models can be found on the STAT 2420SED OLE.

The minimum passing threshold for both continuous assessment and the examination is 30 marks out of 100 marks. In order to pass the course, you need to meet both thresholds.

Online requirement

This course is supported by the Online Learning Environment (OLE).

On the OLE, you will be able to discuss topics with other students and your tutor on the course discussion board, and have access to a rich array of materials such as stop presses, errata, the course schedules, Excel data sets and detailed solution guide for all of the self-test exercises as well as multimedia materials, such as lecture PPT slides and class recordings.

OLE also includes the following three sub-components related to your assignments:

Assignment File — all assignment questions will be posted on the OLE
Assignment submission and extension
Assignment (multiple-choice) submission — answers to the multiple-choice assignment must be submitted through the Assignment (MC) submission system. No postal mailing is accepted.

To access the OLE, students will need to have access to the Internet. The use of the OLE is required for the study of this course.

Equipment

It is essential that you have access to a home PC with an Internet connection for this course. Your home computer should be installed with Microsoft Windows (Windows 7 or above).

You will also need a calculator for this course.

Software

Most units in this course have a section based on using statistical software in the Technology Centers that appear throughout the textbook. Spreadsheets and step-by-step procedures for conducting statistical and data analysis are provided in these Technology Centers. They will require the use of Microsoft Excel spreadsheets.

For working with these Excel spreadsheets, you will need to install an Excel add-in statistics software package called XLSTAT on your computer. This version of XLSTAT is specifically built for Pearson statistical analysis with an add-in tool. It offers a wide variety of functions to enhance the analytical capabilities of Microsoft Excel®. XLSTAT is compatible with all Excel versions (except 2008 for Mac).

A Student Access Kit will be provided together with the textbook for you to install the XLSTAT software.

Set book(s)

Weiss, N A (2017) Introductory Statistics (10th edn, Global edn.). Essex: Pearson.