STA248H1 Lecture Notes - Lecture 1: Statistical Inference, Observational Study, Categorical Variable
27 Oct 2015
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Document Summary
Statistics is the science of collecting, organizing and interpreting data. The goal of statistics is to use imperfect information (our data) to infer facts, make predictions, and make decisions. Need quantitative data to use statistics but lots of subjects/problems can be quantified. Statistical inference is making a decision or a conclusion based on the data. Data are numerical facts with context and we need to understand the context if we are to make sense of the numbers. Any set of data contains information about some group of individuals. Individuals are the objects upon which we collect data. Individuals can be people, animals, and many other things. Sometimes when the objects that we want to study are not people, we often call them cases. A variable is any characteristic of an individual. A variable can take different values for different individuals. Categorical variable: a variable that places an individual into one of two or more groups or categories.
