Just finished! I just finished the CMU OLI Probability & Statistics course, which I started... somewhere back in March or June. I think, overall, it's a pretty good statistics course. What I like best about it is that it is heavy about quizzes and exercises with real-world datasets, so I learned a bit more about R as well as learning the basics.
It covers (https://oli.cmu.edu/jcourse/webui/syllabus/outline.do?section=66b1a66880020ca600b8f6e6295753ca&from=66b1bfc080020ca6012390014e52d1b7) from a fairly practical standpoint: data graphing, stuff like means or medians or distributions, the rules of probability, conditional probability, probability trees, Bayes's theorem, binomials and the normal distribution in particular, confidence intervals, z-tests, t-tests, ANOVA f-tests, the chi-squared test, linear models.
It has some drawbacks, of course: it's largely NHST-based as one would expect; the Java applets make copy-and-paste impossible on my Linux system which made answering questions a bit annoying; the R code is not really explained so you have to figure things out yourself; parts of it can be very repetitious (if I never have to specify what is the null hypothesis and what is H_1, it will be too soon) and trivial leading to occasional '-_- yeah whatever' reactions.
But overall I'm pretty glad I did it. I understand much better the tools I was using to analyze my self-experiments and hopefully it'll be a good base for tackling a Bayesian textbook like Kruschke's 2010 Doing Bayesian Data Analysis.
It covers (https://oli.cmu.edu/jcourse/webui/syllabus/outline.do?section=66b1a66880020ca600b8f6e6295753ca&from=66b1bfc080020ca6012390014e52d1b7) from a fairly practical standpoint: data graphing, stuff like means or medians or distributions, the rules of probability, conditional probability, probability trees, Bayes's theorem, binomials and the normal distribution in particular, confidence intervals, z-tests, t-tests, ANOVA f-tests, the chi-squared test, linear models.
It has some drawbacks, of course: it's largely NHST-based as one would expect; the Java applets make copy-and-paste impossible on my Linux system which made answering questions a bit annoying; the R code is not really explained so you have to figure things out yourself; parts of it can be very repetitious (if I never have to specify what is the null hypothesis and what is H_1, it will be too soon) and trivial leading to occasional '-_- yeah whatever' reactions.
But overall I'm pretty glad I did it. I understand much better the tools I was using to analyze my self-experiments and hopefully it'll be a good base for tackling a Bayesian textbook like Kruschke's 2010 Doing Bayesian Data Analysis.
Congratulations!Nov 1, 2012
Nov 2, 2012
I recently completed this one: http://pa-mar.net/Main/Study/Online%20Courses/StatisticsOne.html and I was pretty happy with it.Nov 2, 2012
Nov 2, 2012
XiXi, kiba was doing the Khan stats at the time I was finishing up OLI; he said it topped out at z-scores, so it had maybe half the content or less and also many fewer exercises too. I'm not sure about the Udacity: OLI didn't cover Simpson's Paradox or 'Maximum Likelihood Estimation' but it seemed to cover the other stuff and more.
As for your other link dump - I find I need exercises and easy problems much more than I need books, per se. Any chance of summarizing quality of all those links from that perspective?Nov 2, 2012
I am currently at section 20 of udacity st101. I came across the above links when I have been researching how to learn statistics and looking for resources. I haven't read those eBooks yet. I posted the links here because I thought someone might find them useful or could provide feedback on them.Nov 2, 2012
Re: maximum-likelihood estimation
The prerequisite for the course you posted is basic algebra. The udacity course talks about maximum-likelihood estimation but doesn't really explain it very well.
Some of the stuff only makes sense in combination with the discussion forum if you are not already well-trained.
Here is a very intelligible proof of maximum-likelihood estimation (see the most upvoted reply by user:Goldsong): http://forums.udacity.com/st101/questions/6375/mle-proof-problem-set-3-help
ETA: It takes differential calculus to grasp the MLE proof.Nov 2, 2012
does OLA provides statement of accomplishment or certificate?Aug 13, 2014