The use of the Old Faithful Geyser data in both undergraduate and graduate statistics courses

Abstract

Many statistics teachers in line with the recommendations of several studies suggest using real-life context data during class lessons. The present work shows the use of the Old Faithful Geyser eruptions as a real-life data example for teaching statistics at a university. It can be adapted for basic courses to more advanced ones. During this study, we illustrated how to use the Old Faithful Geyser data to discuss concepts and methods related to descriptive statistics, inferences and curve fitting for an introductory statistics course. In the same way, we use the data to examine some uses in advanced class lessons that involve topics such as bootstrap method, inferences for the normal mixture models, goodness of fit tests, kernel density estimation (KDE), as well as some nonparametric regression methods, namely, kernel smoothing, LOWESS and smoothing splines.