Your Stat Prof’s Introduction to Statistics

Author

Karl Gregory

Preface

Your Stat Prof (YSP) has prepared for you an introductory textbook on statistics. He has used it in place of a required text while teaching STAT 515 at the University of South Carolina.

A few points about the book:

  • It is work in progress.

  • It does not require you to have any knowledge of calculus. In writing it, YSP has assumed only a command of basic arithmetic and algebra and, most critically, an eagerness to learn more.

  • Most of the data sets in the book were collected by YSP himself, either from his students in various classes or “in the field”, i.e. in his day-to-day life. He chose to use very simple data sets because i) they are fun and ii) easy to understand.

  • YSP has provided all code for generating the plots in this book (sometimes it is R code, sometimes it is Python code). Code is not the emphasis of this book, so it is not explained.

  • Apart from on this page, YSP will tend to write in the first-person plural (or the royal/academic “we”), for syntactical convenience.