STAT 301 Lecture Notes - Unimodality, Bar Chart
Document Summary
Statistics is the science of analyzing data and drawing conclusions from that data. The entire group of objects about which we desire information. In order to get information from all individuals in a population, we would take a census. A subset of the population about which we acquire information. We use samples because of cost constraints, time constraints, the impossibility of checking all individuals of a population, or the destructive nature of tests. As long as our sample is representative of the population, we can use it to draw inferences about the population. A variable is any characteristic or trait that we are interested in that may change from object to object. Types of variables, each with 2 levels: categorical (qualitative) Data fits into distinct classes: nominal: no natural order, ordinal: natural order, numeric (quantitative) Data is described as a number: discrete: data falls only at distinct points, continuous: data can take any number in an interval.
