Click here for an overview of the modules offered in this online course.
Statistics
Statistics is the science of drawing inferences about populations from samples. For example if we wish to test the hypothesis that males and females differ in population mean height, we might take a sample of male and female heights and using what we know about the sample means and how heights vary, evaluate the strength of evidence for this hypothesis.
The module presented here explains how to conduct a range of null hypothesis significance tests (NHST) using R, including analysis of variance, linear regression and analysis of covariance. NHSTs form the backbone of the frequentist method and essentially attempt to derive the probability of obtaining the test statistic or a more extreme if the null hypothesis was true. Our primary unifying framework will be the General Linear Model (GLM). Although not all frequentist statistics are GLMs, many of the more familiar are, and they share the same underlying assumptions and philosophy.