Statistics 597C

Computing Environments for Statistical Research

Course Personnel:   

Professor:                     Naomi Altman                naomi@stat.psu.edu          312 Thomas              865-3791

Web Page: http:// www.stat.psu.edu/~naomi/Stat597C/

Homework

Weekly assignments are designed to help you assimilate and practice the techniques covered in class and to prepare you for the material to come.

Project

Students will work in groups of 2 or 3 on a simulation project to answer a question of interest about statistical methodology – e.g. how well does a t-test work with skewed data.

Grade Breakdown

homework                                60%

project                                     40%

Software

Mathematica is proprietary software and can be used in PSU labs on Windows or Unix.  Some computers in the statistics computing labs have Mathematica.

R is free and can be downloaded from www.r-project.org.  It is available on Unix, Linux, Windows and MacOS.

Texts

There are no texts for this class.  

For Mathematica, we will use the on-line tutorial.

For R, you can use the HTML help from the R toolbar.  There are excellent texts on Splus which can be used if you need additional help.  (Splus is the commercial version of R.  It has essentially the same syntax and functions as R.)

For Unix/Linux we will use the on-line tutorial: http://www.ee.surrey.ac.uk/Teaching/Unix/

Additional resources can be found at: http://www.stat.psu.edu/resources/computing/index.html