Week 4: Basic Statistical Inference
Agenda
- Homework quiz (5 mins) on Homework 2.
- Lecture on basic statistical inference in R, including hypothesis tests and confidence intervals for one or two means or proportions, and chi-square tests for independence in two-way tables.
- Like last week, you may download an R script (which contains only the code chunks from the lecture) and follow along in RStudio by running line-by-line: week_4.R
- Hands-on lab to explore a dataset concerning housing-related data for Boston census tracts. You will use descriptive statistics and simple visual displays to summarize the distributions of several variables across the census tracts.
Supportive reading outside class
(Optional but recommended) the best supporting textbook material for this week is Chapters 10 and 11 of this book:
- Navarro, D. J. (2019). Learning statistics with R: A tutorial for psychology students and other beginners (Version 0.6.1). University of Adelaide. Retrieved from https://learningstatisticswithr.com. Link to pdf
For visual learners
Another great resource is https://seeing-theory.brown.edu/, which has interactive visuals to explain the concepts behind statistical inference (among other statistical topics).