STA 131B Introduction to Mathematical Statistics


Summary of course contents:

  • Intro (2 lect.): Concept of a statistical model; observations as random variables, definition/examples of a statistic, statistical inference and examples throughout the entire course: emphasize the difference between population quantities, random variables and observables
  • Methods of estimation: MLEs, Bayes, MOM (5 lect.) including: (a) likelihood function; finding MLEs (finding a global maximum of a function) invariance of MLE; some limitations of ML-approach; exponential families; (b) Bayes approach, loss/risk functions; conjugate priors
  • MSE; bias-variance decomposition, unbiased estimation (2 lect) (IV) Sampling distributions: (5 lect) (a) distributions of transformed random variables; (b) t, F and chi^2 (properties:mgf, pdf, moments...); (c) sampling distribution of sample variance under normality; independence of sample mean and sample variance under normality (V) Fisher information CR-lower bound efficiency (5 lect)
  • Confidence intervals and bounds; concept of a pivot; (3 lect)
  • Some elements of hypothesis testing: (5 lect) critical regions, level, size, power function, one-sided and two-sided tests; p-value); NP-framework, perhaps t-test

Restrictions:
None

Illustrative reading:
Probability and Statistics by Mark J. Schervish, Morris H. DeGroot 4th Edition 2014, Pearson 

Potential Overlap:
None

History:
None