Introduction to Statistics and Data Science for Management

Our last class will be on June 28.
Your term paper topics and data set assignment was sent to your touro email account on June 11th at 2pm. Please check your email.

Course Description

This course introduces to the theory and practice of describing and analysing data, testing hypotheses and how to use the free statistical computing software R for your data analyses.

Topics discussed include, but are not limited to, combinatorics, probability, random variables, density and distribution functions, sampling from a population, sample properties and descriptive summary statistics, and inferring population characteristics from a random sample.

Course Objectives

The course will enable students to describe and to analyse data using simple statistical methods and to interpret and to report their data analysis results. Students will learn how to use the statistical computing software R, a software widely used in academia and industry.

Course Materials

Required:

The course does not follow a single textbook, there will be weekly, mandatory reading assignments from different sources as indicated under the topics below.

Data Analysis

  • Keller, G., 2018. Statistics for Management and Economics, 11th ed. Cengage.
  • Levine, D.M. and Stephan, D.F., 2010. Even You Can Learn Statistics, 2nd ed. Pearson.
  • Reinhart, A., 2015. Statistics Done Wrong. No Starch Press. https://www.statisticsdonewrong.com/
  • Selvamuthu, D. and Das, D., 2018. Introduction to Statistical Methods, Design of Experiments and Statistical Quality Control. Springer.
  • Tukey, J.W., 1977. Exploratory data analysis. Addison-Wesley.
  • Upton, G.J.G., 2017. Categorical Data Analysis by Example. Wiley.
  • Urdan, T.C., 2011. Statistics in plain English. Routledge.
  • De Veaux, R.D., Velleman, P.F. and Bock, D.E., 2018. Intro stats, 5th ed. Boston: Pearson.
  • Wickham, H. and Grolemund, G., 2016. R for data science: import, tidy, transform, visualize, and model data. O’Reilly Media, Inc. https://r4ds.had.co.nz/

Data Visualization & Communication

  • Chang, W., 2021. R Graphics Cookbook, 2nd edition. O’Reilly Media, Inc. https://r-graphics.org/
  • Cleveland, W.S., 1993. Visualizing Data. Hobart Press.
  • Cleveland, W.S., 1994. The elements of graphing data. Hobart Press.
  • Few, S., 2009. Now you see it. Analytics Press.
  • Few, S., 2012. Show me the numbers, 2nd ed. Analytics Press.
  • Few, S., 2015. Signal – Understanding What Matters in a World of Noise. Analytics Press.
  • Harris, R.L., 1999. Information Graphics. Oxford University Press.
  • Healy, K., 2018. Data Visualization: A Practical Introduction. Princeton University Press. http://socviz.co/
  • Healy, K., 2018. The Plain Person’s Guide to Plain Text Social Science. http://plain-text.co
  • Kirk, A., 2019. Data Visualisation, 2nd edition. SAGE.
  • Knaflic, C.N., 2015. Storytelling with Data. Wiley.
  • Knaflic, C.N., 2020. Storytelling with Data - let’s practice! Wiley.
  • Miller, J.E., 2015. The Chicago Guide to Writing about Numbers, 2nd ed. Chicago University Press.
  • Robbins, N.B., 2005. Creating More Effective Graphs. Wiley.
  • Schwabish, J., 2021. Better Data Visualizations. Columbia University Press.
  • Turabian, K.L., 2018. A Manual for Writers of Research Papers, Theses, and Dissertations, 9th ed. University of Chicago Press.
  • Wainer, H., 2005. Graphic Discovery – A Trout in the Milk and Other Visual Adventures. Princeton University Press.
  • Wainer, H., 2009. Picturing the Uncertain World. Princeton University Press.
  • Wickham, H., 2016. ggplot2: Elegant Graphics for Data Analysis. Springer. https://ggplot2.tidyverse.org/
  • Wilke, C.O., 2019. Fundamentals of Data Visualization. O’Reilly Media, Inc. https://clauswilke.com/dataviz/ https://github.com/clauswilke/dataviz
  • Xie, Y., 2015. Dynamic Documents with R and knitr. CRC Press. https://github.com/yihui/knitr-book/tree/master/markdown
  • Xie, Y., Allaire, J.J. and Grolemund, G., 2018. R markdown: The definitive guide. CRC Press. https://bookdown.org/yihui/rmarkdown/
  • Yau, N., 2013. Data Points – Visualization that means something. Wiley.

Course Requirements:

Students must read the weekly reading assignments before each session. Students need access to a computer with the statistical computing software R. To get this access, students should create an account at https://rstudio.cloud for an in-browser version of RStudio and R. Alternatively, R is available free of charge from www.r-project.org. The graphical frontend RStudio is available in a free version, too. R and Rstudio are installed in the college’s computer lab.

Homework needs to be submitted electronically before class. See below for problem sets and deadlines.

Instructor Information:

Prof. Dr. Dennis A. V. Dittrich
dennis.dittrich@touroberlin.de
https://economicscience.net

You can always reach me via email. For meetings in my office, appointments can be arranged through my webpage at: https://economicscience.net/appointments/

Updated information, links to the literature, additional materials, etc. can be found on my webpage.

Grading Guidelines:

Grading ComponentWeight
Problem Sets70%
Data Analysis Project: Report30%

Workload

A typical 3 US credits / 5 ECTS course requires 150 hours of your time. The table below identifies how I expect those 150 hours will be allocated. While you do not receive direct marks for reading, reading will affect your ability to participate in class discussions and activities and your ability to succeed in the assessments and therefore your final grade.

ActivityTime
Class Time (3 hours / week)45 hours
Reading (4 hours / week)60 hours
Problem Sets (2 hours / week)30 hours
Preparation and Review (1 hour / week)15 hours

Weekly Topics and Reading Assignments

Session 1:

Join the TCB-stats workspace on RStudio.cloud.

Session 2

Session 3:

Session 4:

Session 5:

Session 6:

Session 7:

  • Probability Distributions and the Central Limit Theorem
    Required reading:
    Keller, G., 2018. Statistics for Management and Economics, 11th ed. Cengage. Chapter 7-8.
    https://seeing-theory.brown.edu/probability-distributions/index.html

    slides and video

    Further recommendations:
    Urdan, T.C., 2011. Statistics in plain English. Routledge. Chapter 4.
    Levine, D.M. and Stephan, D.F., 2010. Even You Can Learn Statistics, 2nd ed. Pearson. Chapter 5.
    Good, P.I., 2013. Introduction to Statistics Through Resampling Methods and R, 2nd ed. Wiley. Chapter 3.
    Chihara. L.M. and Hesterberg, T.C., 2019. Mathematical Statistics with Resampling and R, 2nd ed. Wiley. Chapter 4.

Session 8:

  • Probability Distributions and the Central Limit Theorem
    Required reading:
    Keller, G., 2018. Statistics for Management and Economics, 11th ed. Cengage. Chapter 8-9.

    slides and video

Session 9:

  • Inference: Estimation of Population Parameters and their Margin of Error - Continuous Data
    Required reading:
    Cumming, G. and Calin-Jageman, R., 2016. Introduction to the New Statistics. Routledge. Chapter 5.

    slides and video

    Further recommendations:
    Keller, G., 2018. Statistics for Management and Economics, 11th ed. Cengage. Chapter 10.
    Good, P.I., 2013. Introduction to Statistics Through Resampling Methods and R, 2nd ed. Wiley. Chapter 4.
    Levine, D.M. and Stephan, D.F., 2010. Even You Can Learn Statistics, 2nd ed. Pearson. Chapter 6.
    Urdan, T.C., 2011. Statistics in plain English. Routledge. Chapter 7.
    Chihara. L.M. and Hesterberg, T.C., 2019. Mathematical Statistics with Resampling and R, 2nd ed. Wiley. Chapter 5 and 7.

Session 10:

Session 11:

  • Inference: Null Hypothesis Tests and Significance - Continuous Data - One Sample
    Required reading:
    Urdan, T.C., 2011. Statistics in plain English. Routledge. Chapter 9.

    slides and video

    Further recommendations:
    Levine, D.M. and Stephan, D.F., 2010. Even You Can Learn Statistics, 2nd ed. Pearson. Chapter 8.
    Good, P.I., 2013. Introduction to Statistics Through Resampling Methods and R, 2nd ed. Wiley. Chapter 5.
    Chihara. L.M. and Hesterberg, T.C., 2019. Mathematical Statistics with Resampling and R, 2nd ed. Wiley. Chapter 8.
    Keller, G., 2018. Statistics for Management and Economics, 11th ed. Cengage. Chapter 12.

Session 12:

  • Inference: Null Hypothesis Tests and Significance - Continuous Data - Multiple Samples
    Required reading:
    Urdan, T.C., 2011. Statistics in plain English. Routledge. Chapter 10 and 11.
    Heiss, A., 2019. Half a dozen frequentist and Bayesian ways to measure the difference in means in two groups.

    slides and video

    Further recommendations:
    Levine, D.M. and Stephan, D.F., 2010. Even You Can Learn Statistics, 2nd ed. Pearson. Chapter 8 and 9.
    Good, P.I., 2013. Introduction to Statistics Through Resampling Methods and R, 2nd ed. Wiley. Chapter 5.
    Chihara. L.M. and Hesterberg, T.C., 2019. Mathematical Statistics with Resampling and R, 2nd ed. Wiley. Chapter 12.
    Keller, G., 2018. Statistics for Management and Economics, 11th ed. Cengage. Chapter 13 and 14.

Session 13:

  • Inference: Categorical Data - Estimation of Population Parameters and their Margin of Error, NHST
    Required reading:
    Cumming, G. and Calin-Jageman, R., 2016. Introduction to the New Statistics. Routledge. Chapter 13.
    Agresti, A., 2019. An Introduction to Categorical Data Analysis, 3rd ed. Wiley. Chapter 2 and Section 8.1.

    slides and video

    Further recommendations:
    Upton, G.J.G., 2017. Categorical Data Analysis by Example. Wiley. Chapter 2-4.
    Chihara. L.M. and Hesterberg, T.C., 2019. Mathematical Statistics with Resampling and R, 2nd ed. Wiley. Chapter 8 & 10.
    Bilder, C.R. and Loughin, T.M., 2015. Analysis of Categorical Data with R. Wiley. Chapter 1.

Session 14:

  • Experiment and Survey Design: Randomization and Measurement Required reading:
    Good, P.I., 2013. Introduction to Statistics Through Resampling Methods and R, 2nd ed. Wiley. Chapter 6.
    Ford, C., 2018. Getting started with the pwr package

    slides

    Further recommendation:
    Cumming, G. and Calin-Jageman, R., 2016. Introduction to the New Statistics. Routledge. Chapter 2 and 10.
    Boddy, R. and Smith, G., 2010. Effective Experimentation. Wiley.

Session 15:

Topics and reading assignments are subject to changes.

Homework Problems

You will find the homework problems and other material for download in this pCloud folder. [Click Here!]

Upload you homework solutions to this pCloud folder [Click Here!]

RMarkdown for homework problems

You have to use RMarkdown with PDF output for your homework solutions. See the RStudio lessons on RMarkdown and R Markdown: The Definitive Guide for an introduction and reference to RMarkdown, respectively. See also Xie, Y., 2015. Dynamic Documents with R and knitr.

If you do not have a pCloud account yet: You can get one for free! You do not require an account to access to above folders.