| ANTHROPOLOGY 4559/7559: |
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| QUANTITATIVE | |
| ANALYSIS II |
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Description This is a second course in statistical methods useful in many disciplines, including archaeology, anthropology, and environmental sciences. The goal is to equip students with statistical skills useful in analyzing empirical variation, deciphering links to the environmental and historical contexts in which that variation occurs, and using the results to advance scientific understanding. Coverage includes probability distributions, basics of maximum-likelihood and Bayesian estimation, linear and generalized-linear models, non-parametric smoothing, multivariate distances, Mantel regression, and ordination methods (principal component analysis, correspondence analysis, and multidimensional scaling). The course emphasizes practical data analysis using R. There is one required text for the course: Dalgaard, Peter 2008 Introductory Statistics with R, Second Edition. Springer, New York. Consult the Syllabus for additional required reading, all of which will be available on Collab |
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Requirements Written work for the course includes Problems Sets and a Final Project. Problem Sets will be assigned nearly every week. Completed problem sets will be due the following week, at the beginning of class, when we will discuss them. Your write up should include not only your numerical results, illustrated with appropriate graphics, but also a description of how you got them and what you think they mean, both in statistical and archaeological terms. The text should be no more than four pages, doubled spaced. You should also be prepared to offer the class a succinct summary of your work, as a contibution to the class discussion of the problem sets. Late problem sets will not be accepted. The Final Project is your opportunity to use the methods we have covered in the course to tease substantive meaning out of archaeological data. Note that the emphasis here is on meaning: the project should emphasize analytical methods as tools to make and evaluate defensible inferences about past dynamics from material evidence. You will need to identify an historical or anthropological issue and one or more sets of quantitive archaeological data that might be used to illuminate it. You are encouraged to choose issues and data in which you have a personal research interest and, therefore, basic familiarity with the current background literature. The data you use should contain information on several different variables that are of potential relevance to your problem. A key part of the project will be defending their relevance. The data should contain additional variables that independently document either the temporal or spatial contexts of the objects (assemblages, artifacts) characterized by the "relevant" variables. Over the first several weeks of the course, we will work together to identify suitable issues and datasets for everyone. The topic and dataset(s) for your project must be approved by the instructor. Your write up for the final project should not exceed 15 pages (double-spaced), exclusive of graphics. Grades of the course will be computed as follows: PS*.6 + FP*.3 + CD*.1, where PS=mean score for all problem sets, FP=score for the final project, and CD=mean score for contributions to class discussion. |
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Some R Links |
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Datasets
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Seriation Tool
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Diversity Bootstrap
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