EME 210
Data Analytics for Energy Systems

How to use your textbook effectively

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The textbook for this course is:

Statistics: Unlocking the Power of Data, 3 Edition. R. Lock, P. Lock, K. Lock Morgan, E. Lock, D. Lock. Wiley. ISBN: 978-1-119-68216-5, Oct. 2020. 864 pages.
  • Make sure to get 3rd edition!!!
  • Hardcover, etext, loose-leaf, etc. are all acceptable
  • WileyPlus not needed
  • If you're on the University Park campus, it is available in the EMS library (Deike Building)

Each lesson in this course has associated readings from this textbook (referred to as "Lock5"). These readings are specified by referring to the section number in the book, so, for example "Lock5: 2.1" means Secion 2.1 in the book. Section 2.1 is contained in Chapter 2 (the first number of the section refers to the chapter). Sometimes multiple sections will be associated with a lesson (e.g., "Lock5: 2.5-2.7" means Sections 2.5, 2.6, and 2.7). 

The readings offer an alternate and more in-depth explanation of the concepts covered in the lesson material presented on this site. The additional examples given by the book can be particularly helpful for guiding your own solutions to the assignment problems in this class, and show how to interpret other results, that aren't demonstrated in the examples on this site, that you may encounter in your statistical analyses. I think you will find the examples and problems in this book to be quite interesting, as all are motivated by actual, real-world data.

All of the datasets used in the book can be found here: https://www.lock5stat.com/datapage3e.html. Some assignments will explicitly ask you to download data from this link and perform your analysis in Python with those data. You may find for other problems that it is simply helpful to look at the underlying data, although not explicitly required for the problem. 

Last but not least, the authors of the book have developed a web app to go along with it: StatKey. StatKey is referenced throughout the book as a way to solve some of the problems, and the output from StatKey is used in some of the images in the text. It is not required that you use StatKey for this course. What you will learn in Python will accomplish what StatKey does, and you will benefit from having coded that yourself. Therefore, you are required to use Python in your assignment submissions. However, you may use StatKey, or any other resources, to check your work.