Overview
Supporting materials for informal ASTR Statistics/Data Analysis seminars during Summer 2015.The files herein will probably always be "under construction." If you find mistakes or bugs, please let me know. The intention is for you to be able to try these files out yourself, to get fluent with the ideas they contain.
Statistics is a subject where terms have a very precise, specific meaning, although practices can differ between sub-fields. There may be times in these files where I incompletely or sloppily state definitions, you are encouraged to check the literature if you find your interest piqued. The books in SBCW 2216 should cover most concepts you're likely to see in these seminars, please don't remove those books from SBCW 2216 as other students will need them (as will I!).
IPython notebooks
For more on IPython notebooks and how to use them, go to the IPython notebook homepage.To use an IPython notebook that already exists on your system, in the command-line "cd" to the enclosing directory and then type
ipython notebook mynotebook.ipynb
to open it. To start a blank notebook server, just type
ipython notebook
where you will be greeted by a file browser-like interface. (Double-clicking on the notebook file may not work on your computer).
(Note: the IPython team (now part of the Jupyter project) recently incremented the version of the IPython notebook, so all features of all the notebooks might not work on your laptop (though after June 1st 2015 they should all work on all the machines in SBCW 2216). Let me know if you experience difficulty!)
Files for seminars
I provide a few different versions to avoid troubleshooting your system. If the notebook doesn't work for you, check the link above for more information about how to set up the ipython notebook on your system (see link above) or just try the other two formats.For the notebook and python files, right-click and save. The webpage links should open straightforwardly in a new tab.
| Topic | Notebook | .py file with methods | Static webpage version |
|---|---|---|---|
| 001 - The Central Limit Theorem | right-click or ctrl-click to download | right-click or ctrl-click to download | Click to open in new tab |
| 002 - Some probability distributions | right-click or ctrl-click to download | Click to open in new tab | |
| 003 - Frequentist Monte Carlo and Straight-line Fitting | right-click or ctrl-click to download | Click to open in new tab | |
| 004 - Propagation of Uncertainties (including Bias) | right-click or ctrl-click to download | Click to open in new tab | |
| 005 - More about uncertainty propagation in one and two dimensions | right-click or ctrl-click to download | Click to open in new tab | |
| 006 - General uncertainty propagation through functions f(x,y,z,...) | right-click or ctrl-click to download | Click to open in new tab | |
| 007 - Fitting a model to data | right-click or ctrl-click to download | Click to open in new tab |