Welcome! 

You have landed at the Online Resources offered by Wellesley College's Quantitative Analysis Institute, which seeks to expand the role of statistics and data science in research, teaching, and learning at Wellesley and beyond.

These modules are designed for learners of any age who have taken an introductory statistics course and are ready for intermediate exposure to statistics and data science. Maybe you are here because you want to learn the statistical software R, or maybe you are hoping to solidify and enhance your understanding of statistical fundamentals. Maybe you are interested in non-parametric methods or regression modeling. Maybe you took a statistics course that did not emphasize computation and practical data handling skills, and you are here for the data science tools integrated throughout these modules. No matter why you are here, we hope that you will pause to consider the data ethics readings and join our efforts to establish ethical data science practices.

We emphasize thinking statistically, evaluating assumptions, and developing practical skills for real-life applications. There are two types of content. The conceptual content consists of recorded lecture material. The R content consists of videos explaining various R commands, using a series of R example code files.

These modules will enhance your ability to:

• Use the statistical software R 

• Evaluate the strengths, weaknesses, and appropriateness of a variety of statistical techniques

• Given a data set: state hypotheses, explore the data in R, identify and apply appropriate analysis methods, and assess assumptions

• Communicate statistical results graphically

• Handle common practical challenges of data analysis

Please begin with the Outline, which you can use to navigate the site.

This material was created by the faculty and students of the Wellesley College Quantitative Analysis Institute, including QAI Director Casey Pattanayak, Susan Black '20, Donna Gan '20, Joanna Harton '16, Maddie Kolaja '22, Teresa Li '19, Kat Liang '17, Sandy Liu '25, Sarah Elizabeth Stockman '23, and Kily Wong '16. These modules are used for the QAI Summer Program and STAT 260 at Wellesley College, though the assignments and assessments used in those courses are omitted from this site. 

We are continuing to update and refine these materials and add new topics. As this site is always in progress, we would love to hear any thoughts or feedback.

The videos embedded in these pages are collected at the QAI youtube channel. The most popular videos are Log Transformations, Variance and Covariance, Bonferroni, and Web scraping with rvest, but we don't know why!