Statistics
Textbooks
Boundless Statistics
Introduction to Statistics and Statistical Thinking
Overview
Statistics Textbooks Boundless Statistics Introduction to Statistics and Statistical Thinking Overview
Statistics Textbooks Boundless Statistics Introduction to Statistics and Statistical Thinking
Statistics Textbooks Boundless Statistics
Statistics Textbooks
Statistics
Concept Version 8
Created by Boundless

The Purpose of Statistics

Statistics teaches people to use a limited sample to make intelligent and accurate conclusions about a greater population.

Learning Objective

  • Describe how Statistics helps us to make inferences about a population, understand and interpret variation, and make more informed everyday decisions.


Key Points

    • Statistics is an extremely powerful tool available for assessing the significance of experimental data and for drawing the right conclusions from it.
    • Statistics helps scientists, engineers, and many other professionals draw the right conclusions from experimental data.
    • Variation is ubiquitous in nature, and probability and statistics are the fields that allow us to study, understand, model, embrace and interpret this variation.

Terms

  • sample

    a subset of a population selected for measurement, observation, or questioning to provide statistical information about the population

  • population

    a group of units (persons, objects, or other items) enumerated in a census or from which a sample is drawn


Example

    • A company selling the cat food brand "Cato" (a fictitious name here), may claim quite truthfully in their advertisements that eight out of ten cat owners said that their cats preferred Cato brand cat food to "the other leading brand" cat food. What they may not mention is that the cat owners questioned were those they found in a supermarket buying Cato, which doesn't represent an unbiased sample of cat owners.

Full Text

Imagine reading a book for the first few chapters and then being able to get a sense of what the ending will be like. This ability is provided by the field of inferential statistics. With the appropriate tools and solid grounding in the field, one can use a limited sample (e.g., reading the first five chapters of Pride & Prejudice) to make intelligent and accurate statements about the population (e.g., predicting the ending of Pride & Prejudice).

Those proceeding to higher education will learn that statistics is an extremely powerful tool available for assessing the significance of experimental data and for drawing the right conclusions from the vast amounts of data encountered by engineers, scientists, sociologists, and other professionals in most spheres of learning. There is no study with scientific, clinical, social, health, environmental or political goals that does not rely on statistical methodologies. The most essential reason for this fact is that variation is ubiquitous in nature, and probability and statistics are the fields that allow us to study, understand, model, embrace and interpret this variation.

In today's information-overloaded age, statistics is one of the most useful subjects anyone can learn. Newspapers are filled with statistical data, and anyone who is ignorant of statistics is at risk of being seriously misled about important real-life decisions such as what to eat, who is leading the polls, how dangerous smoking is, et cetera. Statistics are often used by politicians, advertisers, and others to twist the truth for their own gain. Knowing at least a little about the field of statistics will help one to make more informed decisions about these and other important questions.

The Purpose of Statistics

Statistics teaches people to use a limited sample to make intelligent and accurate conclusions about a greater population. The use of tables, graphs, and charts play a vital role in presenting the data being used to draw these conclusions.

[ edit ]
Edit this content
Prev Concept
What Is Statistics?
Inferential Statistics
Next Concept
Subjects
  • Accounting
  • Algebra
  • Art History
  • Biology
  • Business
  • Calculus
  • Chemistry
  • Communications
  • Economics
  • Finance
  • Management
  • Marketing
  • Microbiology
  • Physics
  • Physiology
  • Political Science
  • Psychology
  • Sociology
  • Statistics
  • U.S. History
  • World History
  • Writing

Except where noted, content and user contributions on this site are licensed under CC BY-SA 4.0 with attribution required.