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The Professional Masters in Psychology- Data Science in Human Behavior program will provide many opportunities to explore, learn, and apply statistics as a way to better understand your data. This page offers a few different types of resources for you to explore if you want to get a head start on thinking about data analytics.
In many ways, statistics and programming are overlapping categories. Statistics are a discipline, practice, or science interested in collecting, analyzing, interpreting, and making claims about data. On the other hand, programming uses a formal language (e.g. R, Python, C++, SQL) to outline the steps for a program to execute on a specific task. Unless you plan to calculate all of your statistics by hand, you’ll want to use a program to perform your process.
There are many different programming languages and statistical software packages that analysts may use. However, one of the more common programming languages for data analysis is R. In Section 2, we’ll provide you with resources that introduce you to R.
While our courses are designed to teach you what you need to know to engage in data science, this page provides resources to introduce—or reintroduce—you to the core concepts of statistics. Below you’ll find helpful videos that describe common statistical concepts, a popular introduction to statistics blog, and other resources. The resources below provide a lot of information, so we’ve tried to prioritize certain topics for you.
The following resources have been curated to meet differing levels of prior knowledge. All align with the kinds of statistics you’ll be encountering in your Year 1 coursework.
One particularly useful resource is the series by Crash Course on statistics. In this series, there are 44 interesting and relevant topics you may wish to watch. In many cases, these videos go into each topic in depth. Certain topics and videos, such as the ones on regression, will also be suggested as a resource during your classes in the program.
To help you get started, we prioritized the videos to help you make choices based on how much time or how many videos you are interested in watching.
These videos provide a foundation and review of the fundamentals in statistics.
Another useful resource is Khan Academy, which also features video instruction, but additionally provides interactive quizzes to apply your knowledge.
This resource provides a quick overview of how most common statistic models and tests can be simplified and considered as a linear model. (Think y = mx + b).
This open course created by Dr. Kelly Bodwin of California Polytechnic State University gives a helpful overview of statistics, professional ethics, data visualization, and programming skills.