STAT 311 Lecture Notes - Lecture 1: Rocky Mountain National Park, Karl Popper, The American Heritage Dictionary Of The English Language
Document Summary
The science of using information discovered from collecting, analyzing, and organizing numbers (data) . The mathematics of the collection, organization, and interpretation of numerical data, especially the analysis of population characteristics by inference from sampling. The science that deals with the collection classification, analysis, and interpretation of numerical facts or data, and that, by use of mathematical theories of probability, imposes order and regularity on aggregates of more or less disparate elements. Less dry definition: there is a thing called reality . It produces observable information that we call data . Statistics is the process by which we use that data to try and learn something about reality. It is imperfect and limited and our answers are always wrong. This can be done visually (with graphs) or with numbers (actual data). We might want to use data to learn about a quantity that is unknown or practically unknowable.
