Statistics is the science of collecting, analyzing, and drawing conclusions from data. It involves designing studies, describing data through measures like the mean and median, and making inferences. The development of statistics was influenced by the need to understand information like population sizes for governments and advances in probability theory from gambling. Key statistical concepts include measures of central tendency (mean, median, mode), variability (standard deviation), and equations for calculating them.
Statistics is the science of collecting, analyzing, and drawing conclusions from data. It involves designing studies, describing data through measures like the mean and median, and making inferences. The development of statistics was influenced by the need to understand information like population sizes for governments and advances in probability theory from gambling. Key statistical concepts include measures of central tendency (mean, median, mode), variability (standard deviation), and equations for calculating them.
Statistics is the science of collecting, analyzing, and drawing conclusions from data. It involves designing studies, describing data through measures like the mean and median, and making inferences. The development of statistics was influenced by the need to understand information like population sizes for governments and advances in probability theory from gambling. Key statistical concepts include measures of central tendency (mean, median, mode), variability (standard deviation), and equations for calculating them.
Statistics is the methodology which scientists and mathematicians have
developed for interpreting and drawing conclusions from collected data (Jarkko Isotalo, n.d., pg. 2). Statistics is the science of gaining information from numerical and categorical data which everything that deals even remotely with the collection, processing, interpretation and presentation of data belongs to the domain of statistics, and so does the detailed planning of that precedes all these activities (Jarkko Isotalo, n.d., pg. 2). David Stephenson (2000) states that statistics is concerned with exploring, summarising, and making inferences about the state of complex systems Application of statistics is very broad since it can be applied to different fields such as Mathematics, Industry, Biology, Business and Astronomy . For example, Mechanical Engineering deals with the measurement of machine parts by the means of observation. Statistical methods are found to be the most probable measurements to avoid these measurement errors. Agresti & Finlay (1997) stats that statistics consists of a body of methods for collecting and analysing data. From the above, it should be clear that statistics is much more than just the tabulation of numbers and the graphical presentation of these tabulated numbers. Statistics provides methods for design, description and inference. Design is the process where planning and carrying out research studies; description is the process to summarise and explore data while inference is a process where
predictions are making and the phenomena represented is generalising by
the data (Jarkko Isotalo, n.d., pg. 3). Statistics was only used by the rulers in the past. Besides, the applications of statistics was very limited by the rulers to get their information about lands, agriculture, commerce, population of their states to assess their military potential, their wealth, taxation and other aspects of government (eMathZone, 2014). There are two important factors which contribute towards the development of statistics in the world. First is need to make sense of the large amount of data collected by population surveys in the emerging nation states (David Stephenson, 2000). Meanwhile, the mathematical foundations for statistics advanced significantly due to breakthroughs in probability theory inspired by games of chance (gambling) at the same time (David Stephenson, 2000). Probability is also one of the related areas of mathematics like statistics which concern with analysing the relative frequency of events. However, there are basic differences in interpreting the relevance mathematical evidences. For example, probability predicts the likelihood of future events while statistics analyses the frequency of past events (Steve Skiena, 2001). Besides, probability is primarily a theoretical branch of mathematics, which studies the consequences of mathematical definitions while statistics is primarily an applied branch of mathematics, which tries to make sense of observations in the real world (Steve Skiena, 2001). In short, probability theory enables us to find the consequences of a given ideal world, while statistical theory enables us to measure the extent to which our world is ideal (Steve Skiena, 2001). When performing statistical analysis on a set of data, the mean, median, mode, and standard deviation are all helpful values to calculate (Andrew MacMillan, 2006). These values are useful when creating groups or bins to organize larger sets of data. The median and mean are measures of central tendency where each summarises the main feature of a data set. Unlike the mean, the median is unaffected by extreme scores or more often known as outliers (Victoria University of Wellington, 2013). The mode of a set of data is the value which occurs most frequently. The standard deviation is the average distance between the actual data and the mean.
Xi
- Equation 2.1
Mean ,= i=1 n
n F 2 Median , M =L+ I f
( )
X i
i=n 1
n1 i=1 Standard Deviation , =
- Equation 2.2
- Equation 2.3
WhereL: lower limit of the interval containing the median
n: total number of frequencies F: cumulative frequency corresponding to the lower limit f: frequencies in the interval containing the median I: width of the interval containing the median