Tabletop Statistics

Author

Karl Gregory

Preface

Here is a working textbook for an introductory statistics course. By “working” I suppose I mean that it is a work in progress; but it is also “working” in the sense that I have 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 does not require any knowledge of calculus. Only basic arithmetic and algebra skills are required to understand what is presented.

  • I do not bring in many data sets other than those I have gathered in my classes or in real life (there are a few canned data sets taken from other sources, for example in 43  Simple linear regression, 41  One-way ANOVA, and 42  Contingency tables, that I will endeavor to replace with some originals next time I teach from the book). I chose to use simple data sets that I have collected myself because i) they are fun and ii) they are easy to understand.

  • “Tabletop Statistics” is a working title, meaning that it might change, but I am using this title for now because I am picturing someone sitting at a table and flipping a coin or rolling dice or shuffling a deck of cards and learning from this book a new way to think about the randomness of the outcomes generated by these activities. Also, I think that the best way to learn this material is to sit at a table and write down notes in a notebook and engage earnestly with the thought experiments put forward. Sit and draw pictures on pieces of paper. Sit and do the arithmetic and the algebra. Go slowly. Work through the practice exercises. When you have to compute something on data, write a small amount of R or Python code.

  • All code is provided (sometimes R code, sometimes Python code), though code is not the emphasis of this book. It is not a book trying to teach software tools but rather concepts.