Case Studies in Statistical Thinking

In this chapter, you will practice your EDA, parameter estimation, and hypothesis testing skills on the results of the 2015 FINA World Swimming Championships.

Some swimmers said that they felt it was easier to swim in one direction versus another in the 2013 World Championships. Some analysts have posited that there was a swirling current in the pool. In this chapter, you'll investigate this claim! References - Quartz Media, Washington Post, SwimSwam (and also here), and Cornett, et al.

Herein, you'll use your statistical thinking skills to study the frequency and magnitudes of earthquakes. Along the way, you'll learn some basic statistical seismology, including the Gutenberg-Richter law. This exercise exposes two key ideas about data science: 1) As a data scientist, you wander into all sorts of domain specific analyses, which is very exciting. You constantly get to learn. 2) You are sometimes faced with limited data, which is also the case for many of these earthquake studies. You can still make good progress!

Of course, earthquakes have a big impact on society, and recently are connected to human activity. In this final chapter, you'll investigate the effect that increased injection of saline wastewater due to oil mining in Oklahoma has had on the seismicity of the region.