Special Topics: Psychometrics: A Statistical Modeling Approach

Catalog description

Much of the social, educational, policy, and professional worlds involve measuring the skills, abilities, attitudes, decision-making, etc. of people and #8212; from SAT's and GRE's for school, to 360-evaluations in business. This is the field of modern psychometrics, and it involves (at least) two kinds of craft: designing good sets of questions, and designing and fitting statistical models that extract the information we want from the responses to those questions. In this course we will touch on both kinds of craft, but we will concentrate on the second: what do statistical models for psychometric data look like, and how can we design, fit, and use them in practice? We will look at these models from a variety of statistical perspectives, but we will concentrate on the applied Bayesian point of view. Prerequisite: 36-401 Min. grade C Course Website: http://www.stat.cmu.edu/academics/courselist