Oh man, I thought statistics would be a breeze after calculus. And, I guess it is sort of easy. But this online format means I am basically teaching the entire thing to myself because the class is so poorly structured. But I did all my homework that was due this month, and am now taking a break before jumping into programming tomorrow, and my exam on Friday. My poor brain got a workout trying to figure out how to calculate standard deviations (answer: it is sooo long and boring and sucks).
Leave me congratulations, for powering through and getting all my answers correct. I am an ego-driven person at heart, and I need to be told how smart I am so I can believe it again after that mental workout.
So you have to find the mean (average) of all the data points, then subtract the mean from each data point. Then you square all the results, then add those answers together. Then you divide by one less than the total number of data points. That gives you the variance. You take the square root to find the standard deviation.
It’s a different way of doing math. Probability was hard for me. Statistics is way easier, but I guess it is different. Class, teacher, circumstances all play a role.
Way to go @Ninjastar . Very proud of you for putting in the time and achieving that with math. Very impressive and good luck with the rest of your studies. You can do this!
Congratulations! Teaching yourself statistics is quite an achievement. We had a statistics class for psychology when I was at school. It was quite a challenge.
Statistics and probability is useful when applied to the correct sample size. The probability of an outcome or event to occur is dependent on the ratio or percentage number.
(To quote Bill Hicks)
… But it does sound somewhat familiar.
