How to Use Statistics

Steve Lakin is an award-winning lecturer in Mathematics at the University of Glamorgan, where he specialises in teaching basic mathematics and statistics to a wide range of students across all courses and subjects.

Preface and acknowledgements

How to use this book

A note on mathematics, calculators and computer software

Introductory statistics

1. Introduction to statistics and data

2. Presentation of data

3. Averages

4. Cumulative frequencies and percentiles

5. Measures of dispersion

6. Working with frequency distributions

Essential mathematics

7. Factorials, permutations and combinations

8. Sigma notation

Correlation and regression

9. Correlation

10. Linear regression

Probability

11. An introduction to probability

12. Multiple probabilities

13. Probability trees

14. Expected values and decision criteria

15. Conditional probability

Probability distributions

16. Introduction to probability distributions

17. The Poisson distribution

18. The normal distribution

19. The binormal distribution

Hypothesis testing

20.  Introduction to hypothesis testing.  

21.  z-tests

22.  t-tests

23.  ÷2-tests

24.  F-tests. The use of F-tests for comparison of variances

Statistical Tables

Table A - The normal distribution N(0, 1)

Table B - Confidence limits for the z-test

Table C1 - The one-tailed t-test

Table C2 - The two-tailed t-test

Table D - Critical values for the ÷2 distribution

Table E1 - Critical values for the F-test (5%)

Table E2 - Critical values for the F-test (1%)

Summary, glossary and appendices

Summary and further work

Glossary

Appendix 1 - 'Use of a calculator' test

Appendix 2 - The Greek alphabet

Appendix 3 - Some useful Excel commands



Solutions to exercises