Corsi di Studio del Dipartimento di Economia e Statistica "Cognetti de Martiis"

The course aims to provide the methodological and applied fundamentals of statistical analysis, covering descriptive univariate and bivariate statistics, and an introduction to probability theory.

Knowledge of the scientific terminology and capability of understanding the theoretical and applicative topics of introductory statistics.
The capability of applying knowledge and understanding to read, interpret and critically evaluate the results of descriptive statistical analyses and probabilitstic models.
The ability to decide autonomously what analyses to undertake to describe the characteristics of a population and their relationship.
The ability to communicate effectively the results of statistical analyses and their logical foundations in written and oral form.
The acquisition of the competences needed to study more advanced statistical concepts, related to statistical inference and multivariate regression.

Due to the coronavirus emergency, the lectures are delivered as power point presentations, with audio comments, uploaded on the Moodle platform. Some lectures could be delivered via streaming, on the Webex platform. All the notices will be published on Moodle.

WRITTEN EXAM

Due to the coronavirus emergency, the exam in the month of July will be done online, on the Mooddle platform, in connection with the exam comission via Webex platform. The exam in the month of September will be delivered in face-to-face and remote modes, following the indications of the univeristy rectorship.

Il the internet connection falls during the exam, it will not be possible to re-connect. In this case the students will take the exam in oral form, if possible at the end of the same day of the written exmination.

Due to organizational reasons, the students registered to the exam who decide not to take the exam in that date are warmly invited to cancel their name at least 3 days before the exam.

the exam consists in two parts:

- First part: 16 multiple choice questions on the basic concepts

- Second part: 4 exercises or theoretical questions on the entire program of the course.

If the student answers correctly to at least 12 questions, she will have sccess to the second part. Below this score the exam will be considered failed. 

The students who pass the first part will take part to the second section of the exam, right after the end of the first part.

Final evaluation. The score of the first part will be equal to the number of correct questions (thus, with a macìximum of 16 points). The second part can add up to 14 points (7 for each module of the course). To pass the exam it is required to obtain at least 2.5 points per module.

There will be 20 additional hours of exercise sessions, dedicated to presenting and solving exercises  on the main topics of the course.

DESCRIPTIVE STATISTICS (MOD 1)

Descriptive statistics: the statistical population and the statistical units.
Frequency distributions and grafical representation
Measures of position: mean and trimmed mean, mode, median, percentiles.
Measures of dispersion, Tchebychev's inequality.
Bivariate analysis and analysis of depencence, statistical dependence and interdependence (and their measures), dependence in mean (and its measures).
Simple and composite index numbers.

PROBABILITY AND RANDOM VARIABLES (MOD 2)
Events and algebra of events
Postulates
Classical probability  
Conditional probability
Bayes' theorem
Probability concepts under other approaches.
Discrete random variables
Probability and cumulative probability functions 
Continuous random variables
Density functions
Expected value and variance of a random variable
Important discrete random variables: uniform, Bernoulli, binomial, Poisson, geometric
Important continuous random variables: uniform, exponential, Normal
Central limit theorem
Bivariate random variables
Bivariate normal distribution

Textbooks:

Simone Borra, Agostino di Ciaccio Statistica, Metodologie per le scienze economiche e sociali - McGraw-Hill