STSCI 4010 - Great Ideas in Statistics

(crosslisted) ILRST 4010
(MQR-AS)

Spring. 4 credits. Letter grades only.

Prerequisite: Statistics at the level of ECON 3110/ILRST 3110/STSCI 3110.

J. Bunge.

An in-depth study of some of the principal ideas in the intellectual history of statistics, from the 18th century to the present day. Classical topics include (but are not limited to): regression, hypothesis testing, maximum likelihood, and resampling. Modern topics include the Lasso, Bayesian computation, and analysis of observational studies. The perspective will be social, historical and cultural as well as mathematical. The statistical procedures used today, which underlie policy decisions of global importance in economics, public health, and so forth, did not come from nowhere, but were the result of culturally and historically specific processes. For example, the early history of regression analysis is bound up with the history of “eugenics”; and the early history of hypothesis testing is marked by vigorous (and well-recorded) debates between the proponents of different approaches. We will illuminate these intellectual developments using both original and modern textual sources, and relate them to current scientific enterprises and controversies.