Resources

Reference pages to keep open while you read

These four pages are the course’s reference shelf. They do not introduce new material; they collect, in one place, the vocabulary and the decision logic that recur across the weekly notes, so you can look something up quickly and keep the assumption-ladder discipline in view. Keep them open in a second tab while you read the notes and work the labs.

The four resources

  • Methods glossary — the vocabulary used across the course, organized by theme: empirical distributions and ranks; permutation and the bootstrap; rank-based tests; robust summaries and regression; and the method-comparison vocabulary (Type I error, power, coverage, breakdown point). Start here when a term is unfamiliar.

  • Method chooser (decision guide) — a walk from a data shape and a question to a defensible method. It is deliberately not a flowchart that picks “the” test; it lays out the candidates, what each assumes, and what each protects against, so you can choose for a purpose and say why.

  • Resampling guide (permutation vs bootstrap) — the two resampling engines laid side by side: what is held fixed and what moves, what each is for (testing a null vs estimating uncertainty), and the failure cases of each. The single most useful page for keeping “shuffle to test” and “resample to estimate” straight.

  • Robustness & outliers guide — resistant summaries (median, trimmed mean, MAD), the breakdown point, the difference between an outlier, high leverage, and an influential point, and the rule that runs through the course: investigate, do not auto-delete.

A reminder about the numbers

Every numeric value mentioned on these pages comes from the course’s synthetic Riverside Wellness datasets (seed set) and is provisional pending review — this is a draft course site. Use the resources for the vocabulary and the reasoning, not as a table of certified results.

Public vs. graded

These resource pages are public and ungraded — study reference only. For graded specifics — deadlines, submissions, and policies — Blackboard (the LMS) is authoritative.