STAT 301 Lecture Notes - Lecture 1: Statistical Inference, Descriptive Statistics, Rocky Mountain National Park
Document Summary
The science of using information discovered from collecting, analyzing, and organizing numbers . The mathematics of the collection, organization, and interpretation of numerical data, especially the analysis of population characteristics by inference from sampling . It produces observable information that we call data . Statistics is the process by which we use that data to try and learn something about reality. It is imperfect and limited and our answers are always wrong. This can be done visually ( here"s a graph of last week"s temperatures ) or with numbers ( the average temperature last week was 42 degrees fahrenheit ). We might want to use data to learn about the quantity that is unknown or practically unknowable. But maybe we can gather some data and get an approximate idea. We can use our data to estimate the value of an unknown quanitity; we can (and should) also use our data to estimate how wrong we think our estimate is.
