GEOG 2420 Lecture Notes - Observational Study, Confounding, Dependent And Independent Variables
10 Dec 2013
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Document Summary
Fall 2013 geog 2420: chapter 1 intro. Descriptive statistics: the collection, organization, summarization & presentation of data. Inferential statistics: generalizing from samples to populations, performing estimations & hypotheses tests, determining relationships among variables, making predictions. Sample: a group of subjects selected from a population. If properly selected, can represent a population for a study or analysis. A decision making process for evaluating claims about a population, based on samples. Ratio data: equal increments that divide and have a true zero (ex: distance in m) Interval data: equal increments that don"t divide and don"t have a true zero (ex: temperature in degrees celsius) Ordinal data: ordered, but no equal increments (ex: good, better, best) Nominal data groups without order (ex: types of soil) Observational study: observing and analyzing data, more common in geography. Dependent variable: the variable we try to explain, only 1 per hypothesis. Independent variable: the variable that may answer our question.
