Office: Sci-Tech II, room 153 993-1684 (or call 993-1680 and leave a message) 

Text : Nonparametric Statistical Inference, 3rd ed., revised and expanded by 
J. D. Gibbons and S. Chakraborti (Marcel Dekker, 1992)

This is an advanced undergraduate course in nonparametric statistics for 
students who have a good knowledge of basic statistics. Both theory and 
applications will be covered, with a slight emphasis on the application of 
nonparametric techniques to data. Numerous inference situations will be 
examined and students will be exposed to appropriate statistical software.

Prerequisites for this course are a one semester course on probability 
(STAT 344 or MATH 351) and a one semester course on statistics (STAT 354).  
Also, you will need to be able to acquire some computer skills with a minimum 
amount of assistance from the instructor.
                                                                                                                                                                          Week-by-week content
1) Introduction and fundamental concepts; distributions of order statistics
2) Asymptotic results for order statistics; confidence intervals for quantiles
3) Tests based on runs
4) Goodness-of-fit tests
5) Rank-order statistics; some common one-sample test procedures
6) More on the one-sample problem; the general two-sample problem
7) More on the two-sample problem
8) Linear rank statistics and the two-sample problem; linear rank tests for 
     the location problem
9) Linear rank tests for the scale problem; introduction to StatXact
10) More on the scale problem; more on StatXact; tests for the equality of k 
     distributions
11) More on k-sample problems; asymptotic relative efficiency
12) Introduction to nonparametric classification and regression using CART
13) Measures of association for bivariate samples
14) Measures of association in multiple classifications

Grading : best 10 weekly homework assignments will be averaged to determine 
course grade

        I can possibly make arrangements to meet with you outside of my 
scheduled office hours; however, on Tuesdays and Thursdays I do not like to 
be bothered from 7:00 to 7:20.  It will be necessary to collect $5.00 from 
each student in order to partially offset the cost of photocopying; you can 
pay cash or give me a check made payable to Center for Computational 
Statistics.  You are expected to familiarize yourself with the George Mason 
University honor code and abide by it; although it is perfectly okay to seek 
assistance from others on some of the homework problems, it will be considered 
to be a violation of the honor code if you give or receive unauthorized aid 
on certain specified homework problems.  Any class meetings canceled by the 
university due to snow, sleet, power outage, bombing, etc. will be made up if 
possible (it might be necessary to reschedule a missed class for a Friday or 
a Saturday).  Caveat: the schedule and procedures described here for this 
course are subject to change (it is the responsibility of students to attend 
all class meetings and keep themselves informed of any changes).