Statistics Essentials For Dummies

Introduction

This book is designed to give you the essential, nitty-gritty information typically covered in a first semester statistics course. It’s bottom-line information for you to use as a refresher, a resource, a quick reference, and/or a study guide. It helps you decipher and make important decisions about statistical polls, experiments, reports, and headlines with confidence, being ever aware of the ways people can mislead you with statistics, and how to handle it.

Topics I work you through include graphs and charts, descriptive statistics, the binomial, normal, and t-distributions, two-way tables, simple linear regression, confidence intervals, hypothesis tests, surveys, experiments, and of course the most frustrating yet critical of all statistical topics: sampling distributions and the Central Limit Theorem.

About This Book

This book departs from traditional statistics texts and reference/supplement books and study guides in these ways:

• Clear and concise step-by-step procedures that intuitively explain how to work through statistics problems and remember the process.
• Focused, intuitive explanations empower you to know you’re doing things right and whether others do it wrong.
• Nonlinear approach so you can quickly zoom in on that concept or technique you need, without having to read other material first.
• Easy-to-follow examples reinforce your understanding and help you immediately see how to apply the concepts in practical settings.
• Understandable language helps ...