Lesson overview

In this week’s lesson we will be introduced to the fundamental statistical ideas used in many common geological datasets and analyses. This will be our first venture into applying our new Python skills to quantitative geoscience, and we will thus focus more on quantitative and geological concepts, rather than learning new Python skills. Before we start with that, however, we’ll need to see a few more things we can do using NumPy.

  1. A few more useful NumPy functions
  2. Basic statistical terms and concepts
  3. Uncertainty
  4. Reporting measurements
  5. The normal distribution
  6. Exercise 1

Learning objectives

After completing this week’s lesson you should be able to:

  • Create arrays of values using NumPy
  • Understand some basic statistical terms and how they are defined
  • Write your own functions for basic (geo)statistical analysis