Resource Library

This site contains links to journals on probability and statistics published around the world. "Some publishers require registration to browse abstracts. Others require a current subscription to the journal by you or your institution. Most browsable titles, abstracts and papers are only for the past year or so."

This textbook for medical statistics covers many topics such as: Data display and summary; Mean and standard deviation; Populations and samples; Statements of probability and confidence intervals; Differences between means: type I and type II errors and power; Differences between percentages and paired alternatives; The t tests; The chi-squared tests; Exact probabilty test; Rank score tests; Correlation and regression; Survival analysis; Study design and choosing a statistical test.

This applet allows students to explore three methods for measuring "goodness of fit" of a linear model. Users can manipulate both the data and the regression line to see changes in the square error, the absolute error, and the shortest distance from the data point to the regression line.

This lesson poses a series of questions designed to challenge students' possible misconceptions of statistical inference and hypothesis testing. The lesson uses the statistical software, Fathom, and three datasets with information on the number of chips per canister distributed by a snack maker. The data can found at the relation address below.

This page provides a table for selecting an appropriate statistical method based on type of data and what information is desired from the data. It also compares parametric and nonparametric tests, one-sided and two-sided p-values, paired and unpaired tests, Fisher's test and the Chi-square test, and regression and correlation. It comes from Chapter 37 of the textbook, "Intuitive Biostatistics".

This module discusses the probability of an event and relative frequency. The applet shows how empirical probability converges to theoretical probability as the sample size increases. The follow-up example includes an applet that simulates drawing differently colored balls from an urn.

This recording of a web seminar (webinar) provides a tour of the Assessment Resource Tools for Improving Statistical Thinking (ARTIST) web site. During this webinar, ARTIST team member Bob delMas guides you through the ARTIST website. The tour includes an overview of an online collection of literature on assessment in statistics education, much of which can be accessed online or downloaded. Resources for creating alternative forms of assessment such as student projects are also presented. You will also learn about efficient ways to create assessments from items from the ARTIST Item Database using a tool known as the Assessment Builder. By the end of the session, you will have learned how to select assessment items and download them in a format that can be edited with a word processor.

This Flash based applet simulates data from a case study of treatments for tumor growth in mice. This simulation allows the user to place mice into a control and treatment groups. The simulation then compares the difference in the groups based on this haphazard selection to those of a truly random assignment (the user may also create multiple random assignments and examine the sampling distribution of key statistics). The applet may be used to illustrate three points about random assignment in experiments: 1) how it helps to eliminate bias when compared with a haphazard assignment process, 2) how it leads to a consistent pattern of results when repeated, and 3) how it makes the question of statistical significance interesting since differences between groups are either from treatment or by the luck of the draw. In this webinar, the activity is demonstrated along with a discussion of goals, context, background materials, class handouts, and assessments. Key Note for Instructors: The data are drawn from a real experiment with an effective treatment but where the response is correlated with animal age and size (so tumor size will tend to be smaller in the treatment group when measured at the end of a randomized experiment but animal age and size should not be). Typically people choosing haphazardly will tend to pick larger/older animals for the treatment group and thus create a bias against the treatment.

This FLASH based applet illustrates the sampling distribution of the mean. This applet allows the user to pick a population from over 2000 pre-defined populations. The user can then choose size of the random sample to select. The applet can produce random samples in one, 10, 100, or 1000 at a time. The resulting means are illustrated on a histogram. The histogram has an outline of the normal distribution and vertical lines at 1, 2, and 3 standard deviations. The applet can be viewed at the original site or downloaded to the instructors machine.

This introductory probability textbook, freely available here in pdf format, emphasizes the use of computing to simulate experiments and make computations. A set of programs that go with the book and the answers to the odd-numbered problems are also available from this site. Chapter headings include: Discrete Probability, Continuous Probability Densities, Combinatorics, Conditional Probability, Distributions and Densities, Expected Value and Variance, Sums of Random Variables, Law of Large Numbers, Central Limit Theorem, Generating Functions, Markov Chains, and Random Walks.