STATISTICS 120B -- Introduction to Statistics - Winter 2005

Instructor: Gang Liang
Office: 346G Computer Science Bldg
Phone: 949-824-9795
Email: liang@uci.edu


Objectives: Introduce basic concepts of statistical inference including 
    point estimation and confidence intervals, decision anlaysis, categorical
    data methods, and linear regression.  This is the second quarter of a 
    two quarter sequence in probability and statistics.

Prerequisites: Math 2A-B, Math 2D, one of Math 2J, Math 3A, Math 6C,
    Stat 120A or equivalent (Math 130A, Math 131A).

Tentative Course Outline:

Week 1 – Sampling from populations: mean and variance of a population, 
    properties of sample mean and sample variance, sampling distributions.

Week 2 - Estimation of parameters of probability distributions: review 
    probability distributions, estimation via method of moments, maximum
    likelihood.

Week 3 - Evaluating estimators: properties (bias, variance), large sample theory,
    role of sufficiency. 

Week 4 - Normal distribution theory (sample mean, sample variance, t-distribution)

Weeks 5-6 - Confidence intervals: interval estimation via pivotal quantities, likelihood.
    Normal distribution theory and t-distributions.

Weeks 7-8 - Hypothesis tests: likelihood ratio tests, relationship of tests and confidence
    intervals.

Week 9 - Two sample inference: point estimates, confidence intervals and testing for 
    two population means.

Week 10 - Summarizing data


Course Requirements: Students will be assigned problem sets, approximately 
    once in each week.  There will be midterm and final exams.  The grade 
    is determined by performance on this work as follows: homework
    (30%), midterm exam (30%), final exam (40%).  

Text/Reading: Mathematical Statistics and Data Analysis, 2nd edition, 1995
    by John Rice, Duxbury Press. 

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