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Ma 320/BA 320 Applied Statistics

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A software-based course including discrete and continuous probability distributions, hypothesis testing, confidence intervals, correlation and regression. Lecture and lab. Not applicable toward an Actuarial Science major or a Mathematics major or minor. Prerequisites: Ma ACT 20+, SAT 550+, Ma 090 or placement into Ma 103.

Fall 2023 Course Information

Bruins Engage! EXP: Experiential Learning

This course is a designated Bruins Engage! EXP course and has been intentionally designed so that students are challenged to use everything they learn in this course in a real-world data analysis project.  

  • Throughout the semester, students will engaged in performing a statistical analysis of a large, real dataset.   
  • Students will be learning the statistical techniques necessary to perform a solid basic statistical analysis of both quantitative and qualitative data as they work through their project.  SPSS will be utilized for running the data analyses. 
  • Most Thursday labs will be set aside as time for students to be working on projects under the mentorship of their instructor. (Students should also be working on their projects at other times during the week).
  • The statistical analysis project will culminate in a statistical analysis report written in the style that is most appropriate to their project and publication expectations of their career path.
  • An Experiential Learning Reflection paper will be required at the end of the semester.

What this course will do for you:

You will be able to plan and perform a basic analysis of data and communicate the results of your analysis to decision-makers to improve the quality of the decisions made.  You will create an extensive document to serve as a reference on how data analysis should be performed as well as complete a data analysis project that can be used as a portfolio component to demonstrate your analytical skills to prospective employers.

Essential Class Documents

BJUOnline/Canvas contains the following resources

  • Homework solutions -  In accordance with the textbook publisher's guidelines, you may not reproduce, publish, post online, etc. these solutions.  They are for your personal use only.
  • Assigned readings and homework
  • Online Quizzes
  • Assignment Submissions
  • Project instructions

  

Other Class Documents

Time Series Homework Files (if the links in the syllabus don't work properly for you):  Snowfall in Buffalo, Monthly Gas Usage in Iowa, Annual Suicide Rate, Quarterly Production of Bricks

You may need to copy just the data to a new tab in Excel before starting your work.

 

 

Online Resources

Survey questions:  effective questions and poorly worded questions

Visualizing Statistics - a site that will help give insight using visualizations (start with Intuiting Correlation)

Students can access an online copy of Storytelling with Data by Knaflic through the Mack Library Resources.

Flowchart of Inference- this document will be provided to you on tests, so ensure that you are comfortable with it

SPSS Confidence Interval Tools:  proportions and two-population proportions  see additional comments in Unit 3 of the Lecture syllabus (note that we have permission to use this, but may not redistribute it)

Help on Running Regressions (note this uses an older version of SPSS, so not all the menu instructions are the same)

APA Guidelines for citing statistics:   the following are helpful cites, you are welcome to use others

Purdue Online Writing Lab
Illinois State University - Dr. Jeffrey Kahn
University of Washington
Statistics Solutions
APA

 

 

Class Data Sets

The following data sets may be used to facilitate class discussion and are available for your reference. 

https://www.kaggle.com/berkeleyearth/climate-change-earth-surface-temperature-data