Statistics today

During the 20th century, the creation of precise instruments for agricultural research, public health concerns (epidemiology, biostatistics, etc.), industrial quality control, and economic and social purposes (unemployment rate, econometry, etc.) necessitated substantial advances in statistical practices. Today the use of statistics has broadened far beyond its origins. Individuals and organizations use statistics to understand data and make informed decisions throughout the natural and social sciences, medicine, business, and other areas. Statistics is generally regarded not as a subfield of mathematics but rather as a distinct, albeit allied, field. Many universities maintain separate mathematics and statistics departments. Statistics is also taught in departments as diverse as psychology, education, and public health.

History of statistics
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia Jump to: navigation, search History of science

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Statistics arose, no later than the 18th century, from the need of states to collect data on their people and economies, in order to administer them. Its meaning 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 the natural and social sciences. Because of its origins in government and its data-centric world view, statistics is considered to be not a subfield of mathematics but rather a distinct field that uses mathematics; some class it as a sister formal science. Its mathematical foundations were laid in the 17th and 18th centuries with the development of probability theory. The method of least squares was invented around the turn of the 19th century by several authors. Since then new techniques of probability and statistics have been in continual development. Modern computers have expedited large-scale statistical computation, and have also made possible new methods that would be impractical to perform manually
The word statistics have been derived from the Latin word status or the Italian word "statista". Both the word means a political state. The word statistic is also found used by Shakespeare and Milton in the same of states men i.e. a person well versed in the affairs of the state. Its originally meant information useful to the state.

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Statistics has come to play an important role in almost every field of life and human activity. There is hardly any field where statistical data or statistical methods are used for one purpose or the other our arrival in this world and departure from here are recorded as statistical data somewhere and in same form.

Statistics plays an important role in business, because it provides the quantitative basis for arriving at decisions in all matters. All types of banks make use of statistics for a number of purposes. Statistics has proved to be of immense use in physics and chemistry. It has given a new understanding to the essential qualities of the laws of nature.

Statistics plays an important in psychology and education. In experimental psychology, whenever a problem has to be studied, it has to be based on a sample. Statistical methods are also used in analyzing the experimental data and drawing conclusions there from.

We have seen that statistics now holds a central position in almost every field and the importance of statistics is increasing day by day

A statistic is the result of applying a proper function (algorithm) to a set of data available to us.

Statistics has come to play an important role in almost every field of life and human activity. There is hardly any field where statistical data or statistical methods are used for one purpose or the other our arrival in this world and departure from here are recorded as statistical data somewhere and in same form.

Statistics plays an important role in business, because it provides the quantitative basis for arriving at decisions in all matters. All types of banks make use of statistics for a number of purposes. Statistics has proved to be of immense use in physics and chemistry. It has given a new understanding to the essential qualities of the laws of nature.

Statistics plays an important in psychology and education. In experimental psychology, whenever a problem has to be studied, it has to be based on a sample. Statistical methods

are also used in analyzing the experimental data and drawing conclusions there from.

Probability

History
Further information: History of statistics The scientific study of probability is a modern development. Gambling shows that there has been an interest in quantifying the ideas of probability for millennia, but exact mathematical descriptions of use in those problems only arose much later. According to Richard Jeffrey, "Before the middle of the seventeenth century, the term 'probable' (Latin probabilis) meant approvable, and was applied in that sense, univocally, to opinion and to action. A probable action or opinion was one such as sensible people would undertake or hold, in the circumstances."[4] However, in legal contexts especially, 'probable' could also apply to propositions for which there was good evidence.[5] Aside from some elementary considerations made by Girolamo Cardano in the 16th century, the doctrine of probabilities dates to the correspondence of Pierre de Fermat and Blaise Pascal (1654). Christiaan Huygens (1657) gave the earliest known scientific treatment of the subject. Jakob Bernoulli's Ars Conjectandi (posthumous, 1713) and Abraham de Moivre's Doctrine of Chances (1718) treated the subject as a branch of mathematics. See Ian Hacking's The

Emergence of Probability and James Franklin's The Science of Conjecture for histories of the early development of the very concept of mathematical probability. The theory of errors may be traced back to Roger Cotes's Opera Miscellanea (posthumous, 1722), but a memoir prepared by Thomas Simpson in 1755 (printed 1756) first applied the theory to the discussion of errors of observation. The reprint (1757) of this memoir lays down the axioms that positive and negative errors are equally probable, and that there are certain assignable limits within which all errors may be supposed to fall; continuous errors are discussed and a probability curve is given. Pierre-Simon Laplace (1774) made the first attempt to deduce a rule for the combination of observations from the principles of the theory of probabilities. He represented the law of probability of errors by a curve y = (x), x being any error and y its probability, and laid down three properties of this curve: 1. it is symmetric as to the y-axis; 2. the x-axis is an asymptote, the probability of the error being 0; 3. the area enclosed is 1, it being certain that an error exists. He also gave (1781) a formula for the law of facility of error (a term due to Lagrange, 1774), but one which led to unmanageable equations. Daniel Bernoulli (1778) introduced the principle of the maximum product of the probabilities of a system of concurrent errors. The method of least squares is due to Adrien-Marie Legendre (1805), who introduced it in his Nouvelles mthodes pour la dtermination des orbites des comtes (New Methods for Determining the Orbits of Comets). In ignorance of Legendre's contribution, an Irish-American writer, Robert Adrain, editor of "The Analyst" (1808), first deduced the law of facility of error,

h being a constant depending on precision of observation, and c a scale factor ensuring that the
area under the curve equals 1. He gave two proofs, the second being essentially the same as John Herschel's (1850). Gauss gave the first proof which seems to have been known in Europe (the third after Adrain's) in 1809. Further proofs were given by Laplace (1810, 1812), Gauss (1823), James Ivory (1825, 1826), Hagen (1837), Friedrich Bessel (1838), W. F. Donkin (1844, 1856), and Morgan Crofton (1870). Other contributors were Ellis (1844), De Morgan (1864), Glaisher (1872), and Giovanni Schiaparelli (1875). Peters's (1856) formula for r, the probable error of a single observation, is well known. In the nineteenth century authors on the general theory included Laplace, Sylvestre Lacroix (1816), Littrow (1833), Adolphe Quetelet (1853), Richard Dedekind (1860), Helmert (1872), Hermann Laurent (1873), Liagre, Didion, and Karl Pearson. Augustus De Morgan and George Boole improved the exposition of the theory.

On the geometric side (see integral geometry) contributors to The Educational Times were influential (Miller, Crofton, McColl, Wolstenholme, Watson, and Artemas Martin).

A Short History of Probability

From Calculus, Volume II by Tom M. Apostol (2nd edition, John Wiley & Sons, 1969 ):

"A gambler's dispute in 1654 led to the creation of a mathematical theory of probability by two famous French mathematicians, Blaise Pascal and Pierre de Fermat. Antoine Gombaud, Chevalier de Mr, a French nobleman with an interest in gaming and gambling questions, called Pascal's attention to an apparent contradiction concerning a popular dice game. The game consisted in throwing a pair of dice 24 times; the problem was to decide whether or not to bet even money on the occurrence of at least one "double six" during the 24 throws. A seemingly well-established gambling rule led de Mr to believe that betting on a double six in 24 throws would be profitable, but his own calculations indicated just the opposite. This problem and others posed by de Mr led to an exchange of letters between Pascal and Fermat in which the fundamental principles of probability theory were formulated for the first time. Although a few special problems on games of chance had been solved by some Italian mathematicians in the 15th and 16th centuries, no general theory was developed before this famous correspondence. The Dutch scientist Christian Huygens, a teacher of Leibniz, learned of this correspondence and shortly thereafter (in 1657) published the first book on probability; entitled De Ratiociniis in Ludo Aleae, it was a treatise on problems associated with gambling. Because of the inherent appeal of games of chance, probability theory soon became popular, and the subject developed rapidly during the 18th century. The major contributors during this period were Jakob Bernoulli (1654-1705) and Abraham de Moivre (1667-1754). In 1812 Pierre de Laplace (1749-1827) introduced a host of new ideas and mathematical techniques in his book, Thorie Analytique des Probabilits. Before Laplace, probability theory was solely concerned with developing a mathematical analysis of games of chance. Laplace applied probabilistic ideas to many scientific and practical problems. The theory of errors, actuarial mathematics, and statistical mechanics are examples of some of the important applications of probability theory developed in the l9th century. Like so many other branches of mathematics, the development of probability theory has been stimulated by the variety of its applications. Conversely, each advance in the theory has enlarged the scope of its influence. Mathematical statistics is one important branch of applied probability; other applications occur in such widely different fields as genetics, psychology, economics, and engineering. Many workers have contributed to the theory since Laplace's time; among the most important are Chebyshev, Markov, von Mises, and Kolmogorov. One of the difficulties in developing a mathematical theory of probability has been to arrive at a definition of probability that is precise enough for use in mathematics, yet comprehensive enough to be applicable to a wide range of phenomena. The search for a widely acceptable

definition took nearly three centuries and was marked by much controversy. The matter was finally resolved in the 20th century by treating probability theory on an axiomatic basis. In 1933 a monograph by a Russian mathematician A. Kolmogorov outlined an axiomatic approach that forms the basis for the modern theory. (Kolmogorov's monograph is available in English translation as Foundations of Probability Theory, Chelsea, New York, 1950.) Since then the ideas have been refined somewhat and probability theory is now part of a more general discipline known as measure theory." 1. Probability is used in business to evaluate financial and decision making risk. 2. Probability is used to improve business performance.
3. 4. Probability is "a number expressing the likelihood of occurrence of a specific event" (Shao, 1994, p. 217). For use in inferential statistics, this probability must be statistically independent (Peebles, 2003). The central limit theorem is relevant to probability analysis, and it is especially relevant to the use of probability in business. The central limit theorem holds that the totals (and therefore the means) of random samples will be normally distributed no matter what the distribution in the population is like, provided only that the samples are large enough. In most instances where inferential statistics are applied in hypothesis testing, population distributions are unknown. Problems in hypothesis testing related to the central limit theorem most often occur when the sample data apply to perceptions and subjective evaluations by individuals, as opposed to objective data (Peebles, 2003). In classical statistical analysis, probability is predicated on the condition that the outcomes of an experiment are equally likely to occur. The approach in classical statistical analysis to probability is that the lack of knowledge implies that all possibilities are equally likely. The classical conception of probability applies when the events have the same chance of occurring and the set of events are mutually exclusive and collectively exhaustive. This approach allows business researchers to project future outcomes with some degre APPLYING PROBABILITY ANALYSIS IN BUSINESS A database containing demographic and job satisfaction data on employees in three departments of a hypothetical company was used to develop profiling probabilities related to specific characteristics and attitudes. All measurement data are quantitative in character. The database included information on 288 employees. The gender distribution in the organization is 41.7 percent male and 58.3 percent female. The gender distribution in relation to employee tenure with the company is indicated in Table 1. The distribution of all 288 employees by department is indicated in Table 2. In relation to job satisfaction, male employees were somewhat more satisfied than female employees on average. On a satisfaction scale ranging from 1 (least satisfied) to 7 (most satisfied), the mean job satisfaction score for males was 4.4308, while the mean job satisfaction score for females was 4.2583.

5.

6. 7. 8. 9.

Use The Probability Factor To Start Your Small Business Home Business
How do you find a business that is right for you and has a great probability of success? There are two steps that you should take. 1. Pick something that interests you. Better yet, pick something that you are passionate about. If you are not interested or you don't like it, the work rapidly becomes drudgery and you will likely quit after having invested a lot time and money. 2. Find out if there is a market for you business. This is important because if there isn't a market, you could spend months developing your product and if only a couple of people care about it, and no one else is interested, you just wasted a lot of time, money, and potential income. How do you find out if there is a market for what you want to do? 3. Do a search on Overture http://inventory.overture.com/d/searchinventory/suggestion/ and enter one or more words that describe your business. The suggestion tool tells you how many people have searched for your term in the past month. Multiply that number by five to figure the approximate number of searches in the past year. This will tell you how many people are searching for your product

or services. 4. Look at the top 20 returns for your product on the search engines (Google, Yahoo, and MSN) to see what competition you have. Review your competitors' sites to see what they are doing well and to see what they are doing poorly. You may be able to see at what price they are selling a product or service similar to yours. 5. Look at the ads presented by the search engines. They are usually located above the search results and to the right of the search results. If there are a lot of ads for your search terms, then there is probably a market for your product or service. 6. If you have found that there is a lot of activity, go to http://uv.bidtool.overture.com/d/USm/search/tools/bidtool/ and enter your search terms to see how much people are paying Yahoo to advertise your keywords using Pay Per Click. To use PPC you bid for placement on the Yahoo search engine pages. The higher you bid, the higher your placement. If your competitors are bidding $1.50 or more it is a good indicator that there is a real market. If there is little activity, then you probably won't do well and should look for something else or reframe your product or service. If there appears to be a lot of activity for your product or service, then go for it!