What is Statistics
These notes have been taken while studying the Crash Course: Statistics course on YouTube.
Statistics is all about making sense of data and figuring out out how to put that information to use.
Ronald A. Fisher, also a mathematical biologist, proposed Fisherian Runaway, a sexual selection mechanism that explains exaggerated male ornamentation through persistent female choice.
Two related but separate meanings of the word statistics:
Field of statistics which is the study and practice of collecting and analyzing data.
Statistics as in facts about or summaries of data.
Proxy is something that is related to what we want to measure, but is not exactly what we want to measure.
Two types of statistics:
Descriptive statistics describe what the data show and include things like where the middle of the data is - what statisticians call measures of central tendency - and measures of how spread out the data are.
Inferential statistics allows us to make inferences and to make conclusions that extend beyond the data we have in hand.
Inferential statistics lets test on idea or hypothesis.
If statistics were superhero, its batcall would be uncertainty, and its tagline would be “When you don’t know for sure, but doing nothing isn’t an option.”