Has this ever happened to you?
You need to implement a statistical technique you haven’t encountered before. Maybe someone told you you need SEM or linear mixed models or logistic regression, for example.
Luckily, you’ve found a pretty good book on the topic and are cruising along learning it, when it refers to some mathematical concept that you don’t understand. Like the rank of a matrix. Or a logarithm.
Maybe you never took matrix algebra. Maybe you know you understood this many years ago. But after 10 (or many more) years of not using linear algebra on a regular basis, and you just don’t remember exactly what a rank means.
Sure you can do a web search, but it’s still a chore to find a good source that explains what the heck it means.
I just came across this fabulous tutorial website: Khan Academy.
It has video tutorials on many topics in math.
I was particularly pleased to find it because I recently wrote about how complicated issues in statistics, like a Covariance Matrix, are not so intimidating if you understand some linear algebra and can remember what covariance means.
Khan Academy has tutorials on both linear algebra (a lot of them) and basic probability and statistics. So even if the concept you don’t quite remember is a statistical one–like covariance–you can get those as well.
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I love Khan Academy as well! I’ve been using it to learn matrix algebra, to help me understand a free Stanford course on linear optimization.
It’s amazing what he has created. Why was one man able to do what so many educational institutions and nonprofits could not?