Statistical Thinking

Session Overview
This lecture presents ways of ascertaining how dependable information extracted from samples is likely to be. It covers standard deviation, coefficient of variation, and standard error. It also shows how to use pylab to produce histograms. Image courtesy of Kevin Dooley on Flickr.

Session Activities
Lecture Videos

Lecture 15: Statistical Thinking (00:51:31)

About this Video Topics covered: Variance, standard deviation, standard error. Resources

Lecture code handout (PDF) Lecture code (PY)

Recitation Videos

Recitation 6: Probability and Statistics (00:53:28)

About this Video Topics covered: Probability, statistics, Venn diagrams, distributions, standard deviation, Monte Carlo simulation, plotting graphs.

Check Yourself
What does the standard deviation tell us? answer It is a distance which describes the range +/- from the mean containing a particular fraction of the values; it describes the shape of the bell curve.

What is variance? answer A measure of how much spread there is in the possible different outcomes.

What is the coefficient of variation? answer The standard deviation divided by the mean. If it's less than 1, the distribution is considered low-variance.