RSS Certification
The UK's Royal Statistical Society (RSS) offers 3 levels of certification for statisticians. Several statistics.com courses will prepare you well for the "ordinary certificate" exam of the RSS.
| Topic in "ordinary certificate" | statistics.com course |
| Elementary ideas of sampling methods. Definitions of population and sampling frame. Methods of selecting samples (including practical problems) and implications of sample size: simple random sampling, systematic sampling, cluster sampling, quota sampling, stratified random sampling and multi-stage sampling. | Survey design |
| Pilot surveys, censuses, sample surveys, personal interviews, self-completion questionnaires, postal and telephone enquiries. Serial surveys - longitudinal or cross-sectional. Problems arising in the collection of data, late returns, 'freak' values and their treatment. | Survey design |
| Non-sampling errors. Identification and interpretation of bias error (e.g. from non-response, errors in defining the population, enumerator distortion, etc). | Survey design |
| Design of simple questionnaires and forms for collection of data. Formulation, classification and coding of questions, including verification. Making questionnaires suitable for data processing and analysis; use of missing value codes. | Survey design |
| Distinction between observational and experimental studies. | Introduction to Statistics: 1 variable |
| Approximation, limits of accuracy, rounding and accuracy of recording. Percentages, ratios, rates and linear interpolation. Distinction between discrete and continuous data. | Basic Concepts in Probability and Statistics |
| Construction and uses of frequency tables for one or more variables and contingency tables. Tables for presenting collections of results together with summary tables of frequencies, relevant averages, standard deviations, etc. | Basic Concepts in Probability and Statistics |
| Graphs and diagrams, their use in analysis and presentation. Construction, uses and limitations of scatter diagrams, time charts, stem and leaf diagrams, histograms, bar charts, pie diagrams, frequency and cumulative frequency curves and boxplots (box and whisker plots). | Basic Concepts in Probability and Statistics |
| Sample measures of location and dispersion. Arithmetic mean, median, mode, percentiles, range, inter-quartile range, variance, coefficient of variation; their uses and limitations as measures; their calculation from frequency tables and raw data; graphical methods of estimation. Distinction between inter- and intra-subject variation. | Basic Concepts in Probability and Statistics Introduction to Statistics: 1 variable |
| Probability as a measure of uncertainty. Link between probability and relative frequency. Allocation of probabilities in 'equally likely' cases. Mutually exclusive events. Independent events. Addition and multiplication of probabilities with simple applications. Use of Venn diagrams and tree diagrams. | Basic Concepts in Probability and Statistics |
| Calculation of least squares regression line and its interpretation. Correlation as a measure of linear association between two variables. Product-moment correlation coefficient. Spearman's rank correlation coefficient. | Introduction to Regression Introduction to Statistics: 2 variables |
| Simple moving averages for detecting trends and for smoothing time series. Seasonal data. | Time Series Forecasting |