STATS 250 Lecture Notes - Lecture 1: Bar Chart, Categorical Variable, Histogram

• School: U of M
• Department: Statistics
• Course: STATS 250
• Professor: Brenda Gunderson

Document Summary

Statistics: is a collections of procedures and principles for gathering data and analyzing information in order to help people make decisions when faced with uncertainty. Summarizing data: "simple summaries of data can tell an interesting story and are easier to digest than long lists. " Definitions: variable: characteristic that differs from one individual to next, population: the entire group pf items/individuals that we want information about, about which inferences are to be made. Sample: the smaller group, the part of the population we actually examine in order to gather information. Sample data: collected from subset of larger population: population data: collected when all individuals in a population are measured, parameter: a summary measure of population data. Statistic: a summary measure of a sample data. Categorical (qualitative) variable: places an individual or item into on of several groups of category: ordinal: order, nominal: names of things, no order. Skewed: to the right (positive, to the left (negatively, location: approximate center.