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.”