STT-2810 Lecture Notes - Lecture 1: Zip Code
Document Summary
Data is any collection of items that provides information about something. Statistics helps make sense of data and data variation. Data variation: surveys and experiments produce a variety of out comes, data variation is the differences between all of the data produced. Organization of data in a presentable fashion is extremely important to understanding the variation relationships. Respondents are individuals who answer the survey. Subjects and participants are the people who are experimented on. Experimental units are the object of the experiment if it is not a person. Records are the rows of a database. The goal is to describe the population. A sample is used to make inferences about the population. The sample should be representative of the population. Categorical variables are variables that tells what group or category an individual belongs to. Categorical variables can also be referred to as nominal variables or qualitative variables. Categorical variables are hard to analyze with computation.