Statistics

Abstract

If you read the financial pages of your newspaper, you quickly become aware of the importance of inferential reasoning. Statistics is a critical tool and serves two important functions: it is used to summarize a vast amount of known data by a few key numbers and thus make the data manageable (descriptive statistics), and it is used to draw inferences from these numbers (inferential statistics). Of course there are also other, less formal, ways of drawing inferences about the world, and we will investigate some of these as well.

But the judge said he had never summed up before; so the Snark undertook it instead, and summed it so well that it came to far more than the witnesses ever had said!

—”The Hunting ofthe Snark”, Lewis Carroll