Statistics

The last time I took a Statistics course in college was back in freshman year during my second semester of college. I vaguely remember many different concepts that were discussed in class but I would not be able to solve a bunch of different statistics problems. However there have been concepts that have come up again and again in classes that I have taken since my freshman year. An example of this would be chi square problems which seem to be very popular in biology. Chi square problems are done in order to be able to reject or not reject a hypothesis. Observed values are give and expected values are found. The way the problems work is that observed is minus expected and the value that is found is then squared and divided by the expected value. This is done for every single observed value and all of these are added together. The number at the end is then compared to the number found under the degrees of freedom and comparing the two numbers tells you whether or not we accept or reject the hypothesis. Another common thing in physics is standard deviation which is also common in biology. This just tells you the amount of variation that there is in a group as a whole. A low standard deviation tells you that the numbers are pretty close to the average while a high standard deviation tells you that the numbers are spread apart. I also remember doing something involving p values as well as doing combinations. These combinations could be solved by nCr. These are just some of the things I remember from statistics.