21-23 May, 2007 – Three-day course on Statistics by Dr. Alan Chave – Library, School of Cosmic Physics, 5 Merrion Square, Dublin 2.

A three-day course on Statistics was given by Dr. Alan Chave: An introduction to the theory and practice of analysing discrete data such as are normally encountered in geophysics and geology. The emphasis was on statistical aspects of data interpretation using Matlab.

This was based on the first half of a course taught at MIT for the past 12 years (12.714, Computational Data Analysis).

Topic headings were:

• Probability and conditional probability
• Random variables, distributions and expectation
• Special distributions
• Estimation
• Sampling distributions
• Hypothesis testing
• Non parametric methods
• Least squares
• Statistical inference in least squares
• Robust estimation
• Introduction to multivariate statistics
• Principal components analysis