Intro to Statistics with R: Introduction

In this chapter professor Conway will cover types of variables. It is very important to understand what type of variable you are dealing with when conducting a particular type of statistical analysis. You will cover variables such as nominal, ordinal, interval and ratio, and you will experiment with these via interactive exercises in R.

You will look here at distributions in graphs called histograms. A histogram is one of the simplest graphs used in statistics, but they are very useful and very informative. Studying histograms will help you to overcome the tendency to put too much of a focus on summary statistics.

When working with data it is very important to keep in mind what type of scale you are dealing with, hence this chapter on scales of measurement. This chapter will introduce you to the different types of scales with a specific focus on the standard scale, the z-scale.

In the previous chapters you looked at distributions and the importance of these. In this chapter the focus is more on summarizing all available information and drafting summary statistics. To make it a little bit more fun, the examples will be based on a wine tasting experiment :-).

Measures of central tendency try to capture the center point of a distribution. Measures of variability want to capture how much spread there is, or how wide the distribution is. The two measures you will look at in this final chapter will be standard deviation and variance.