### statistical tools

7 March 2013

Econ 41 students are often asked to compute various features of datasets -— mean, variance, and the like. While this is instructive to some extent, by the end of the quarter (and by the end of any course on statistics) asking students to compute certain summary statistics is no longer a useful exercise; by forcing drudgery without support, the exercise is turned into one of procrastination and discontent rather than viewed as providing evidence and backing for other statistical features.

As such, a simple statistic calculator follows. Unlike my usual approach, there is no explanation of the statistics generated; by the time at which it is appropriate to use this calculator, the definition of and intuition behind these statistics should be known, and the only question is how they should subsequently be used.

Understand that this calculator has been mostly debugged, but I make no guarantee that it is accurate. Use at your own peril. If you are interested in statistical computation to a more professional/scalable extent, it is worth learning R or even Excel.

### dataset

 X1 [ one more ] [ compute ]

All included graphics are generated at LaTeX to png .