STAT 1301/2300 – “Statistical Packages”

Fall 2014, Tuesday-Thursday 4:00-5:15PM, CL 230

• e-mail address: sungkyu (at) pitt.edu              
• Office: CL 2734               
• Phone: 412-624-9033
• Office Hours: Thursdays 11:15-12:15,  or by appointment

• e-mail address:   qiw31 (at) pitt.edu 
• TA’s office hours: Mondays 3:00 - 5:00 at Reading Room (CL 2712)

News:

• Final Exam: Take-home. Thursday, Dec. 4 (7PM) to Friday, Dec. 5 (Midnight). 
• Problems (Part I: SAS, Part II: R) :  Download the exam here
• Datasets:  hypertension.dat is contained in the SAS dataset.  college.txt
• Solution code for final exam
• Complete and submit through the Courseweb. 
• Check your previous homework and midterm grades.
• Complete OMET survey.
• Datasets and programs + Handouts for R lectures
• Homeworks
• Midterm II: Thursday, November 20. Open book. Open notes. No electronic devices.
• Answer key to Midterm II
• Instructor's office hour on that day is shifted to 2-3PM. 
• Practice Exam 2 (from Dr. Sovak) and solutions
• Also see the rest of problems below.
• Midterm I: Tuesday, September 30. Open book. Open notes. No electronic devices (no SAS!).
• Answer key to Midterm I
• Practice Exam (from Dr. Block) with solution  : To prepare midterm I on September 30, look at problems 1 and 2(a)-(c).
• Practice Exam (from Dr. Sovak)  : To prepare midterm I on September 30, look at problems 1 and 2.
• No class on Thursday, October 2.

Description:

• use Statistical software (SAS and R) to handle data,
• choose correct methods of data analysis,
• perform data analysis;
• interpret results correctly and effectively.
  

Prerequisite:

Computing:

• SAS is available on the PCs at all campus computing labs, such as Cathedral, Posvar, Forbes Quad and Benedum. If in addition you would like to have SAS on your PC, Pitt's Software Download Service offers SAS for free. SAS can only be installed on Windows or Unix environments (No Mac OS).
• R is a free, open-source software package/programming language for statistical computing, and  is available on the PCs at all campus computing labs, such as Cathedral, Posvar, Forbes Quad and Benedum.  If in addition you would like to have R on your PC/Mac/Unix, it can be downloaded for free at http://www.r-project.org/  
  

Text:

• Peter Dalgaard, Introductory Statistics with R, Second Edition, Springer, New York, NY (ISBN: 978-0387790534)
• Geoff Der and Brian S. Everitt, A Handbook of Statistical Analyses using SAS, Third Edition, Chapman and Hall/CRC, London, UK, (ISBN: 978-1584887843)

Online Resources

On Statstical Procedures:

• Handbook of Biological Statistics by John H. McDonald http://www.biostathandbook.com/

On SAS:

• The little SAS book: a primer, fifth edition by Delwiche, Lora D; Slaughter, Susan J 2012 ( eBook available at Pitt library)
• support.sas.com
• UCLA idre SAS help page
• SAS/STAT User Guide for Versions 7 and 8 (OUTDATED) provides links to pdf documents on popular procedures.

On R:

• A Beginner's Guide to R by Alain F. Zuur, Elena N. Ieno, Erik Meesters 2009 (Springer), eBook available at link.springer.com
• The official intro, "An Introduction to R", available online in HTML and PDF
• John Verzani, "simpleR", in PDF
• Google R Style Guide offers some rules for naming, spacing, etc., which are generally good ideas
• Quick-R. This is primarily aimed at those who already know a commercial statistics package like SAS, SPSS or Stata, but it's very clear and well-organized, and others may find it useful as well.
• Patrick Burns, The R Inferno. "If you are using R and you think you're in hell, this is a map for you."
• Thomas Lumley, "R Fundamentals and Programming Techniques" (large PDF)
• Paul Torfs & Claudia Brauer, "A very short intro to R"
• UCLA idre R help page
• Avril Coghlan, a Little Book of R for Multivariate Analysis

RStudio is an "integrated development environment" (IDE) for R. Using it is not required, but strongly recommended, because it gives everyone, on all computers, a common working environment.

Course Websites:

• Many links and material will be made progressively available at the current page.
• Assignments are submitted and graded electronically through CourseWeb/Blackboard.

Course Requirements and Grading:

• Midterm I, 20%             - Tuesday, September 30
• Midterm II, 20%            - Thursday, November 20
• Homeworks 30%  
• Final 30%                      - Saturday, December 13, 10:00 AM - 12:00 AM

Topics covered: 

University Policies: