STAT 22500 Lecture 1: Introduction to statistics

• School: Purdue University
• Department: Statistics
• Course: STAT 22500
• Professor: Tim Reese

Document Summary

Statistics-study of how to collect, organize, analyze, and interpret information. Advantage of statistics is that it gives a process for estimation and decision making when faced with uncertainties without bias. Population-the collection of individuals or items of interest. Samples-the subset of the population on which we make measurements. Variable-any characteristic of an individual that can take different values for different individuals. This value is known when we take our sample, but it will change from sample to sample. This value is a fixed number, but we could only know its value if we did a perfect census. Since the population is often not available, we use statistics to estimate parameters. Descriptive statistics-methods of summarizing a set of data. No error here because you are summarizing the data you have. Inferential statistics-methods of making inferences about a population based on the information in a sample.