Search results
Results from the WOW.Com Content Network
The word statistics ultimately comes from the Latin word Status, meaning "situation" or "condition" in society, which in late Latin adopted the meaning "state". Derived from this, political scientist Gottfried Achenwall, coined the German word statistik (a summary of how things stand).
Statistical purposes include estimating a population parameter, describing a sample, or evaluating a hypothesis. The average (or mean) of sample values is a statistic. The term statistic is used both for the function and for the value of the function on a given sample.
In statistics, the number of degrees of freedom is the number of values in the final calculation of a statistic that are free to vary. [1] Estimates of statistical parameters can be based upon different amounts of information or data. The number of independent pieces of information that go into the estimate of a parameter is called the degrees ...
The use of descriptive and summary statistics has an extensive history and, indeed, the simple tabulation of populations and of economic data was the first way the topic of statistics appeared. More recently, a collection of summarisation techniques has been formulated under the heading of exploratory data analysis : an example of such a ...
Also confidence coefficient. A number indicating the probability that the confidence interval (range) captures the true population mean. For example, a confidence interval with a 95% confidence level has a 95% chance of capturing the population mean. Technically, this means that, if the experiment were repeated many times, 95% of the CIs computed at this level would contain the true population ...
In descriptive statistics, the mean may be confused with the median, mode or mid-range, as any of these may incorrectly be called an "average" (more formally, a measure of central tendency). The mean of a set of observations is the arithmetic average of the values; however, for skewed distributions , the mean is not necessarily the same as the ...
Statistical bias exists in numerous stages of the data collection and analysis process, including: the source of the data, the methods used to collect the data, the estimator chosen, and the methods used to analyze the data. Data analysts can take various measures at each stage of the process to reduce the impact of statistical bias in their ...
Statistics subsequently branched out into various directions, including decision theory, Bayesian statistics, exploratory data analysis, robust statistics, and non-parametric statistics. Neyman-Pearson hypothesis testing made significant contributions to decision theory, which is widely employed, particularly in statistical quality control.