Biostatistics (SMF 3264) [45 LH]
Prerequisites: SMF 3111: Mathematics
PURPOSE OF THE COURSE
To give the student of Agriculture a good grounding in the basics of Probability and Statistics.
EXPECTED LEARNING OUTCOMES
At the end of the course, the learner should be able to:
- Solve problems in probability
- Determine standard probability distributions of discrete and continuous variables
- Make inferences from samples with respect to confidence intervals and tests of hypotheses.
COURSE CONTENT
Importance of sampling. Sampling techniques; probabilistic, non-probabilistic. Data collection techniques. Data classification; nominal, ordinal, interval, scale. Exploratory data analysis, data screening and transformation techniques. Principles of data tabulation and graphic representation of data. Measure of central tendency for grouped and ungrouped data; average, median, mode. Measures of dispersion: spread, range, mean deviation, variance and standard deviation, quartiles, deciles and percentiles. Probability; Definitions, probability Axioms, compound events, conditional probability, independent and mutually exclusive events, tree diagrams. Simple linear regression.
Random variables. Discrete probability distributions and density function; Bernoulli, binomial and Poisson. Continuous probability distributions and density functions: normal, student’s t, Chi-square and F-distribution. Sampling distributions. Statistical inference. Estimation; Point estimates, interval estimation. Confidence intervals and goodness to fit.