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I refer to the assertion, that all men are equal in the state of nature; meaning, by a state of nature, a state of individuality, supposed to have existed prior to the social and political state; and in which men lived apart and independent of each other. . . . But such a state is purely hypothetical.
The scope of the discipline of statistics broadened in the early 19th century to include the collection and analysis of data in general. Today, statistics is widely employed in government, business, and natural and social sciences. Carl Friedrich Gauss made major contributions to probabilistic methods leading to statistics.
The term statistics comes from the Neo-Latin statisticum collegium (council of state) and refers to science of the state. [6] According to the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD), official statistics are statistics disseminated by the national statistical system, excepting those that are explicitly not to be official". [7]
The supplier provides the "statistics" as numbers or graphics (or before/after photographs), allowing the consumer to draw conclusions that may be unjustified or incorrect. The poor state of public statistical literacy and the non-statistical nature of human intuition make it possible to mislead without explicitly producing faulty conclusion ...
Thomas Hobbes described the state of nature as "solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short" (Leviathan, Chapters XIII–XIV). [135] Locke takes a more benign view of the state of nature and is unwilling to take as hard a stance on the degeneracy of the state of nature. He does agree that it is equally incapable of providing a high quality of life.
Bayesian statistics is often used for inferring latent variables. Latent Dirichlet allocation; The Chinese restaurant process is often used to provide a prior distribution over assignments of objects to latent categories. The Indian buffet process is often used to provide a prior distribution over assignments of latent binary features to objects.
Statistics educators have cognitive and noncognitive goals for students. For example, former American Statistical Association (ASA) President Katherine Wallman defined statistical literacy as including the cognitive abilities of understanding and critically evaluating statistical results as well as appreciating the contributions statistical thinking can make.
Statistics is a field of inquiry that studies the collection, analysis, interpretation, and presentation of data. It is applicable to a wide variety of academic disciplines , from the physical and social sciences to the humanities ; it is also used and misused for making informed decisions in all areas of business and government .