MTH4106 |
Introduction to Statistics |
| Course Material | Spring 2012 |
| Revision period timetable | ||
|---|---|---|
| Monday 23 April 1000–1200 | Office hour | Maths 317 |
| Tuesday 24 April 1000–1200 | Office hour | Maths 317 |
| Wednesday 25 April 1000–1200 | Office hour | Maths 317 |
| Thursday 26 April 1600–1700 | Revision lecture | Mason LT |
| Friday 27 April 1000–1200 | Office hour | Maths 317 |
| Friday 27 April 1400–1600 | Office hour | Maths 317 |
| Monday 30 April 1000–1200 | Office hour | Maths 317 |
| Monday 30 April 1400–1600 | Office hour | Maths 317 |
See my Tips on Revision
| Notice |
|---|
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This material will remain here until after the late summer examination. |
| Feedback on End-of-term Test | |
|---|---|
| Question 1 | There was a clear distinction between those who attended the relevant Minitab practical session and those who did not. The former all gained at least 70% of the marks while the latter scored almost nothing. One student even answered a different question that had been on a previous year's test. |
| Question 2 | Those who worked out these proofs from first principles did well; those who tried to reproduce them like poetry did not. |
| Question 3 | Most people did this one fairly well. Common mistakes included failure to use the continuity correction, failure to explain notation, failure to explain what you were doing, and giving a numerical answer without relating it to the probability asked for. |
| Question 4 | This topic was covered in week 12, so I was not surprised to find that many people did badly, even though the question was part of an assignment. The most common mistake was to do a 2-sided test even though the null and alternative hypotheses had been stated in the question. Another common mistake was inability to read Table 5 of NCST. |
Basic Information
| Lectures | Monday 1000–1100, Arts Two lecture theatre |
| Thursday 1500–1600, Arts Two lecture theatre | |
| Friday 1000–1100, Arts Two lecture theatre | |
| Practicals on Tuesdays | 0900–1000, Groups 4, 5, 6, 8, 9, 11 |
| (all in FB115a): | 1000–1100, Groups 12, 13, 14, 15, 16, 17 |
| 1100–1200, Groups 1, 2, 3, 7, 10, 19, 20 | |
| Lecturer: | Professor R. A. Bailey |
| Office hours | Monday 1130–1300 |
| (room 317 in Maths): | Friday 1500–1630 |
| How to study MTH4106 Introduction to Statistics | |||||||||||
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Lectures | Attend every lecture. Pay attention and write your own notes.
If you have to miss a lecture, borrow notes from one of your friends and copy them out in your own handwriting. Photocopying them will not get the material into your brain. |
3 hours per week | |||||||||
| Notes | After each lecture, but before the next one, read through your notes and make sure that you understand them. If there is anything that you do not understand, look it up in relevant textbooks in the library, or ask a lecturer in his/her office hour. Rewrite your notes to include the extra explanation. |
3 hours per week | |||||||||
| Practicals | Attend your allocated computer lab, and work through the Minitab
practical worksheet. Some of this reinforces material that has been
covered in lectures; some of it is new material that will not be
mentioned in lectures.
During this hour, you also hand in your feedback question(s), and receive your previous assignment with comments on it. The lab does not have room for everyone, so please come at your allocated time. If you have to miss a practical, take a copy of the worksheet from the web and work through it in Minitab in your own time; otherwise, you will not be able to do the next practical. |
1 hour per week | |||||||||
| Minitab | You will need to do some Minitab work in your own time, to finish off the worksheets and do any assignment questions that involves Minitab. | 1 hour per week | |||||||||
| Other assignment questions | Do all the practice questions. Then do the feedback question and hand it in. When you get it back, be sure to read all the comments and make sure that you understand what you did right and what you did wrong. If you still do not understand, ask one of the lab helpers, or ask a lecturer in his/her office hour. |
2 hours per week | |||||||||
Apart from the course description, the data sheets and the learning tips, the items below are PDF files; you will need Acrobat Reader to browse or print them.
Course descriptions and course information
| Response to Questionnaire Comments | |
|---|---|
| Some people said that they hate Minitab. | Using statistical software is an essential part of doing real statistics. Standard spreadsheet software really is not good enough, and has various statistical mistakes. |
| Some people said that they had no time to get help on assignment questions during the Minitab lab. | This is your own choice. You are there for an hour. I am there all the time; so is your tutor. You can put your hand up at any time. It is up to you to decide whether to get help on the assignment or press on with the Minitab: one or other of them will have to be completed later. |
| A few people asked for solutions to practicals. | The whole point of the practicals is that you learn by doing them. This request is like asking for solutions to the instruction “Run a mile”. |
| Many people complained that there is too much talking from students. | I agree completely. If you want to talk, please do not come into the lecture. If you do not like other people talking, please ask them to be quiet. I admit that there was a period earlier in the semester when I probably was not strict enough because I had a very heavy cold. |
| A surprisingly large number of people claimed that “There is a total lack of online notes”. | Hmmm. This comment was greeted with laughter in the lecture. Read on. |
| Many people asked for lecture notes to be put online before the relevant lecture. | I do not put them up straight away, for three reasons. One is that I alter the notes to include any discussion that we had in lectures following questions from you and to include new examples found by you. I think that most people enjoyed the lecture where I asked you to work out some proofs on the spot and then write them on the board: I would not be able to do that if I gave out the lecture notes beforehand. Another is that I usually leave some gaps for you to fill in yourselves. Some of these gaps are set in assignments, so I put up the notes soon after you get your feedback. The third reason is that the only way to get mathematics into your brain is to write it out yourself; no amount of reading will do this for you. When I go to lectures myself, I always take notes. |
| There were requests for me to put more past examination papers on the web page. | The syllabus changed in 2009–2010, so any examination papers from previous years would be misleading. |
| Many people asked for solutions to past examination papers. | I deliberately do not make such solutions available, as I have discovered that they encourage students to learn `model' answers'; then, when faced with a new question, they mimic my answer to an old question rather than really answering the new question themselves. You will do far better if you (i) read the question (ii) think about what the question is asking you to do (iii) answer that question. Real life does not have model answers; you gain knowledge and have to put it into practice. |
If you did not collect your feedback from your tutor during your Minitab lab, please collect it from me during one of my office hours.
See the general advice on lab work.
These data are given in lectures. They are repeated here in case you make mistakes in copying them down. The description of the data, and the units of measurement, are given only in the lectures.
| Feedback on Mid-term Test | |
|---|---|
| Question 1 | This was generally well done. These were the most common
mistakes:
|
| Question 2 | This was not well done, largely because people could not remember the probability mass function for a Geometric random variable. |
| Question 3 | I deliberately gave good examples from the `newspaper' coursework in the last lecture of Week 6, to remind you about these issues. Some extremely interesting and relevant examples were given in the second part of the question. Most mistakes were in the first part: saying that experiments are always quick (field experiments usually take a year); saying that observational studies always use other people's data (simply not true) or have no intervention from the statistician (even measuring height is some sort of intervention). |
| Question 4 | This question was well done, on the whole. In part (b) I was very pleased to see that most people simply worked out the proof as they went along, and so got it right: I could see this because people did the various simplifications and expansions in different orders, and used slightly different notation. By contrast, those people who had tried to learn the proof by heart made a series of small mistakes in writing which meant that each line did not follow from the one before: this showed me that they did not understand what they were writing. |
| Question 5 | Oh dear. In week 6 I wrote this example on the board and advised
you to work it out to make sure that you understood Theorem 7.
It appears that nobody did.
The most common mistake was to write out the solution to a similar question on a previous year's test, which involved the uniform distribution. This demonstrates that reading the solutions to previous tests is not a good way of revising. |
Please note that college regulations state that “the unauthorized use of material stored in pre-programmable memory constitutes an examination offence”. Anyone found doing this will receive the appropriate penalty.
| Tips for Tests and Exams | |
|---|---|
Read each question carefully, work out what it is asking you to do, then answer the question. If the question only asks you to find the probability generating function, there is no point in finding E(X). Show all of your working. Rather than leave early, put more explanation in your answers. Do not start an answer with “=” or write “=” between two things which are not equal. Don't confuse X with x, or Y with y, or G with g. If the question asks you to prove that A = B, don't start by assuming that A = B. If the question says “Define MSE(T). Prove that MSE(T) = A + B”, do not define MSE(T) to be A + B, and certainly do not define MSE(T) to be A - B. If it says “State a theorem” then you need to include the conditions or assumptions of the theorem as well as the result. |
| Tips on Behaviour in Tests and Exams | |
|---|---|
Do not talk in the test/exam room. Do not pass pencils, calculators, etc. between desks. Do not use your phone as a calculator. Leave your coats and bags where the invigilator tells you to. Do not leave the room without permission from an invigilator. |
Page maintained by
R. A. Bailey
r.a.bailey AT qmul.ac.uk
Page updated 27/04/12