SOCECOL 13 Lecture Notes - Lecture 1: Statistical Inference, Descriptive Statistics, Big Data

• School: UC-Irvine
• Department: Social Ecology
• Course: SOCECOL 13
• Professor: Kenneth S.Chew

Document Summary

Professor ken chew state-craft (the art and science of governing a state. Derived from state, or nation), decision-making with big data. Descriptive statistics compresses or distills complicated situations into a few more easily grasped elements. Inferential statistics starts with a few well-formed but simple elements and reconstructs complicated situations. Approximate weighting of assignments iclicker in class questions 20% In every story, data are used to make a judgment about a situation. <> Benefit: enables us both to acquire a simpler grasp of complicated situations and to reconstruct complicated situations from simple summaries. Risk: poorly executed, stats can mislead or worse. Moral: knowing the conclusion is insufficient, one needs to know (starting with data collection) the process used to arrive at the conclusion. Statistics is a collection of procedures and principles of gaining and analyzing information in order to help people make decisions when faced with uncertainty.