Is your number up?

Members of the Applied Statistics Group, who will run the introductory course.

If you use statistics in your job – or would like to - an introductory applied statistics course to be held at Macquarie University on September 1 and 2 is just the ticket.

Aimed at people working in areas such as government, health, tax, education, linguistics, biology and environmental science, it will offer practical help for anyone interested in applying statistical techniques to their data. The emphasis will be on working with real-life data sets, using SPSS software.

Expert teachers

Dr Kehui Luo, a Lecturer in the Department of Statistics, says the lectures and tutorials will be run by a number of highly-qualified staff in touch with recent developments in the field. Around 25 attendees will have the opportunity to listen to lectures, then apply their knowledge on set tasks at individual computers.

“We’ll start on data management and variables. We’ll show people how to describe and summarise the variables, and then teach them how to conduct some commonly-used hypothesis tests,” says Luo.

“We’ll teach them the basic statistical methods used for different types of data. For example, in a hospital they might be collecting data such as cholesterol levels in a target group. You could see whether the level of that group of patients was in line with the normal level across the population, using a t or z test, or whether it was higher or lower.”

In a government department such as a tax office, people might want to look at the average payment across a state compared with the previous year.

Other things to be covered in the course include one-way and two-way analysis of variance, when you have one continuous response and one or two categorical factors; chi-square testing for examining the association between two categorical variables; odds ratio analysis; and an introduction to logistical regression analysis using SPSS.

Those students who want more focus on theory could enrol later for a Master of Applied Statistics. It’s possible to take this online, as a distance student, over a year.

This is the second year the two-day course has been offered. Last year’s students included research staff from the University as well as tax, education, sociology and health researchers. Lecturers this year will include Associate Professor Gillian Heller, Luo and all members of the Applied Statistics Group within the Department.

Luo, whose first degree is in engineering, and who later moved on to take a Masters, then a PhD in statistics, says that any department or group collecting data as part of research can benefit from a good knowledge of statistics.

For more information on the course, contact Dr Luo at kluo@efs.mq.edu.au or go to the course website at www.stat.mq.edu.au/AppStatGroup/index_05.htm