Week 5: Fundamental Summary Statistics#
STATS 60 Spring 2025
10 bonus points for attendance
10 bonus points for completing assignment
Students should download a copy of this week’s Colab file in advance of section, and bring their laptops to section.
Discussion assignment (extra credit, bonus points: 10 + up to 5 additional points):#
Look for a recent example of an article, advertisement, or other media piece which states a statistic of central tendency (a mean or a median) without and mention of variability. The more reputable the source, the better.
In the Google Poll by 11:59PM on Thursday, May 1:
Upload a screenshot and description of the example.
Explain why omitting a discussion of variability is potentially misleading, in this particular case. In what way could the reader be misled if the variability were large?
Do your own research: find a measurement of variability for the distribution in the article/ad, either by consulting the primary sources or by hunting down data and computing it yourself (in e.g. colab).
Decide if knowing the variability changes your conclusions about the information presented.
If your example is chosen for presentation in discussion, you get 5 additional bonus points.
Discussion Agenda#
Show and tell (5 minutes)#
The discussion instructor selects the top example of a mean/median without context from their section.
The student curator explains their example, and how they obtained the variability statistic.
The class discusses how much the conclusions about the information presented are impacted by the added information about variability.
Fundamental Summary Statistics with AI programming (35 minutes)#
Students will get practice analyzing data using fundamental summary statistics.
After being guided through an example by the instructor, students will analyze a World Bank dataset of GDP, by country.
Students (in groups of up to 3) will use AI to:
Plot a histogram
Qualitatively assess the variability of the data in the histogram
Compute the mean, median, standard deviation, and quantiles
Visualize these on the histogram
Recap (10 minutes)#
Students participate in TA led discussion about the exercise, and the information that can and cannot be inferred from the summary statistics.
Optional#
The colab contains an “extra” section with additional datasets: one question from our class survey, an ecological survey of Antarctic penguins, U.S. earthquake data, and Nvidia stock data. Students can repeat the exercise for the GDP data with these datasets, either after section or during section if time allows.