Patrick Honner - Painless Statistics

For Rachele, the center of my data.

Copyright 2022 by Kaplan North America, LLC, DBA Barrons Educational Series

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ISBN: 978-1-5062-8159-9

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Painless statistics? It might sound impossible, but its not. Statistics is easy... or at least it can be with the help of this book!

Whether you are learning statistics for the first time, or you are revisiting ideas you may have forgotten, this book is for you. It provides a clear introduction to statistics that is both fun and instructive. Dont be afraid. Dive inits painless!

Painless Icons and Features

This book is designed with several unique features to help make learning statistics easy.

PAINLESS TIP

You will see Painless Tips throughout the book. These include helpful tips, hints, and strategies on the surrounding topics.

CAUTIONMajor Mistake Territory!

Caution boxes will help you avoid common pitfalls or mistakes. Be sure to read them carefully.

MATH TALK

These boxes translate math talk into plain English to make it even easier to understand statistics.

REMINDER

Reminders will call out information that is important to remember. Each reminder will relate to the current chapter or will reference key information you learned in a previous chapter.

BRAIN TICKLERS

There are brain ticklers throughout each chapter in the book. These quizzes are designed to make sure you understand what youve just learned and to test your progress as you move forward in the chapter. Complete all the Brain Ticklers and check your answers. If you get any wrong, make sure to go back and review the topics associated with the questions you missed.

PAINLESS STEPS

Complex procedures are divided into a series of painless steps. These steps help you solve problems in a systematic way. Follow the steps carefully, and youll be able to solve most statistics problems.

EXAMPLES

Most topics include examples. If you are having trouble, research shows that writing or copying the problem may help you understand it.

ILLUSTRATIONS

Painless Statistics is full of illustrations to help you better understand statistics topics. Youll find graphs, charts, and other instructive illustrations to help you along the way.

SIDEBARS

These shaded boxes contain extra information that relates to the surrounding topics. Sidebars can include detailed examples or practice tips to help keep statistics interesting and painless.

Chapter Breakdown

Chapter One gives you a painless introduction to statistics, with an example that shows you where data comes from, what you can do with it, and what it can do for you.

Chapter Two is all about data, the object of study in statistics. Youll learn about the different types of data and how to represent and visualize it with charts and graphs.

Chapter Three shows you the power of statistics. Youll see how questions about large sets of data can be answered by considering just a handful of representative numbers using descriptive statistics like the mean and standard deviation.

Chapter Four introduces you to the important distributions youll encounter when working with data and shows you how you can use properties of those distributions to make analyzing that data as painless as possible.

Chapter Five focuses on a single distribution of data: the normal distribution. Normally distributed data pops up everywhere in the worldfrom test scores to biological measurements and so much moreso knowing how to work with the normal distribution is key to applying your statistical knowledge.

Chapter Six introduces you to probability, the mathematics of likelihood. A firm grasp of basic probability helps you put your data in context and is essential to understanding important ideas in statistics, like sampling and inference.

Chapter Seven extends your study of probability into conditional probability. You will learn how to analyze the impact that events can have on each other, another central theme in applying statistical knowledge.

Chapter Eight develops the basics of statistical sampling and sampling distributions, which allow you to use statistics to understand entire populations by just looking at a small sample of the data.

Chapter Nine shows you how to construct and interpret confidence intervals, which are important statistical tools that allow you to make educated guesses about unknown quantities while accounting for the uncertainty inherent in the process.

Chapter Ten teaches you about statistical significance: what it is, what it isnt, and how you can measure it.

Chapter Eleven gives you the basic statistical tools you need to tackle bivariate data, like scatterplots, correlation, and linear regression.

Chapter Twelve puts your statistical knowledge in context by helping you interpret and understand the statistical claims youll see and hear all around you.

Statistics is the study of data. Data is everywhere, and statistics can help you collect it, categorize it, analyze it, and interpret it. Data comes in many formsit can be a series of stock prices, the number of touchdowns, or a list of favorite ice creamsbut for all these forms, you can use statistics to help make sense of the data. It can be hard to understand a large set of numbers, but with statistics, working with data can be painless.

How can data help you make decisions and better understand your world? Heres a simple example that illustrates what statistics can do for you and just how painless it can be.