| Instructor: | Brian Habing, Assistant Professor office: 203 LeConte e-mail: habing@stat.sc.edu office phone: 777-3578 home phone: 739-2686 (9am to 10pm only) | ||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
| Course Website: | http://www.stat.sc.edu/~habing/courses/518F00.html | ||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
| Office Hours: | Whenever the door is open, by appointment, and
Tuesday/Thursday 9:00-10:30 Wednesday/Friday 2:30-4:00 | ||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
| Prerequisite: | A grade of C or higher in STAT 515 (Statistical Methods I) or equivalent. | ||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
| Credit: | 3 hours (undergraduate or graduate). | ||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
| Purpose of Course: | To introduce the principles and applications of commonly used nonparametric methods. To compare these methods to their parametric counterparts. To introduce the basic methods for analyzing contingency tables. | ||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
| Required Text: |
Practical Nonparametric Statistics (3rd Edition), by W.J. Conover,
Wiley, 1999.
The readings associated with each class will be listed on the board at the beginning of class. After the class, it is the student's responsibility to read over the listed pages and to seek clarification on any difficulties found. (Either stop by during office hours, send an e-mail, or ask before or after the next class.) | ||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
| Computers: | This course will use the software packages SAS
and S-Plus.
You will have an account on the CSM Windows-NT domain and
the Department of Statistics Unix system. Currently the
computers in LC 303A have SAS, and the PSC lab will have it early in the
semester. S-Plus can be accessed through any computer with X-windows,
a secure shell program, and internet access. NO PREVIOUS KNOWLEDGE OF SAS OR S-Plus IS ASSUMED. | ||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
| Homework: |
Homework is due at the beginning of the class period it was
assigned for. Late homework is not accepted. There will be at least 7 homework assignments. Only the top 5 scores will be counted towards the final grade in the class. Each homework assignment will be worth ten points. Homework will be assigned at least one week in advance in class, and will also be posted on the class website. If the homework is on a handout, that handout will be available in class and during office hours. The writing on the homework must be legible, the work used to obtain the answers must be shown, the final answers must be clearly indicated, and all expository answers should be grammatically correct in order to receive full credit. Extra points may be deducted for violating any of the following:
Any questions about the grading of a problem on the homework must be made by the class period following the one in which it was returned. | ||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
| Project: | An individual final project will be due by 10:30 am on Tuesday, December 5th. The project will contain the analysis of a real data set of interest using both parametric and nonparametric methods, and a simulation study to compare the two procedures used. The outline of all required programs will be provided. The details on the project will be announced on October 2nd. | ||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
| Exams and Topics Covered: |
There will be two exams and the final.
The topics covered in the exams will generally follow the chapters
of the text listed below. However,
the exams may also cover material which was solely
presented in class, and that is not contained in the text. The first exam will be held in class on Friday, September 29th. It will focus on the subjects related to chapters 1 and 2 and section 3.1 of the text, including: probability and counting rules, discrete and continuous random variables, properties of estimators and hypothesis tests, the binomial test and confidence interval. The second exam will be held in class on Friday , November 10th. It will focus on the material related to sections 3.2, 3.3, and 3.5, and chapters 5 and 6 of the text, including: the sign test, McNemar's test, the Mann-Whitney test, the Wilcoxon signed ranks test, measures of correlation, nonparametric regression, the Kolmogorov-Smirnov test, and the bootstrap. The final exam will be held at 9:00am on Wednesday, December 13th. It will focus on the material related to chapter 4 of the text, including: chi-square tests, the Mantel-haenszel test, and loglinear models. Make up exams will be given only in extreme circumstances, and only when accompanied by appropriate documentation. Incidence of cheating and academic dishonesty will be punished to the full extent allowed by university regulations. Any questions concerning a grade received on an exam must be raised by the next class period after it was returned.
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| Grades: |
The grade is determined by the scores on the
homework, project, and the three examinations as follows:
with the letter grade determined by the percentage of points obtained out of the maximum possible 450, rounding the percentages up.
Any student scoring under 69 on either of the first two exams will be given a chance to raise that score to a 69. The "second chance" exam must be taken within a week of the original exam's return. There is no "extra credit". Any deviations from the above grading scheme will be to the benefit of the students. | ||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
| Complaints and Comments: | While there are end of semester evaluation forms, they come far too late to resolve any difficulties experienced in the class. All complaints should be raised by either speaking with me directly, or by anonymously leaving a message in my mailbox in 216 LeConte. |