Introduction to Statistics

Abstract

Basic tasks of statistics: To describe, assess, and pass judgement. To draw inferences concerning the underlying population.

Each of us, like a hypochondriac or like one who only imagines himself to be well, has at some time failed to recognize existing relationships or distinctions or else has imagined relationships or distributions where none existed. In everyday life we recognize a similarity or a difference with the help of factual knowledge and what is called instinctive understanding. The scientist discovers certain new phenomena, dependences, trends, or a variety of effects upon which he bases a working hypothesis; he then must check them against the simpler hypothesis that the effects observed are conditioned solely by chance. The problem of whether observed phenomena can be regarded as strictly random or as typical is resolved by analytical statistics, which thus becomes a method characteristic of modern science.

Scientists and artists have in common their desire to comprehend the external world and to reduce its apparent complexity, even chaos, to some kind of ordered representation: Scientific work involves the representation of disorder in an orderly manner.