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Introduction to Statistics

Course Biostatistics of the graduation in Biomedical Engineering at UFABC

This course is based on two free MOOC courses available on the internet (which I have no participation in):

  1. Intro to Descriptive Statistics
  2. Intro to Inferential Statistics

Flipped classroom: This course will accompany the content of these two online courses (the online courses are taught in English, but there are Portuguese subtitles for videos, and there is support material and forum). The dynamics of the classes will be: 1. Discussion about doubts on the online course; 2. Exams with questions/tests copied from the online course.

Content (this course = online course)

Intro to Descriptive Statistics (videoslessonsforum)

  • Intro to Research Methods
    Introduction to several statistical study methods and the positives and negatives of each.
  • Visualizing Data
    How to take data and display it to the world. How to create and interpret histograms, bar charts, and frequency plots.
  • Central Tendency
    How to compute and interpret the 3 measures of center for distributions: the mean, median, and mode.
  • Variability
    How to quantify the spread of data using the range and standard deviation. How to identify outliers in data sets using the concept of the interquartile range.
  • Standardizing
    How to convert distributions into the standard normal distribution using the Z-score. How to compute proportions using standardized distributions.
  • Normal Distribution
    How to use normalized distributions to compute probabilities. How to use the Z-table to look up the proportions of observations above, below, or in between values.
  • Sampling Distributions
    How to apply the concepts of probability and normalization to sample data sets.

Intro to Inferential Statistics (videoslessonsforum)

  • Estimation
    How to estimate population parameters from sample statistics using confidence intervals and estimating the effect of a treatment
  • Hypothesis Testing
    How to use critical values to make decisions on whether or not a treatment has changed the value of a population parameter
  • t-tests
    How to test the effect of a treatment or compare the difference in means for two groups when we have small sample sizes
  • ANOVA
    How to test whether or not there are differences between three or more groups
  • Correlation
    How to describe and test the strength of a relationship between two variables
  • Regression
    How to describe the way in which changes in one variable are related to changes in a second variable
  • Chi-squared Tests
    How to compare and test frequencies for categorical data.

See the Portuguese version of this page for more details.