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Sunday, September 30, 2018
Photo source: Wikimedia Commons, Martin Grandjean
Photo license: CC BY-SA 3.0
What is statistics? Here is my definition:
Statistics is the study of analyzing numerical data
I believe that statistics can be a useful tool for testing hypotheses and discovering probabilities. Often in statistics, a researcher will study data from a representative sample with the purpose of inferring a conclusion about the whole population. It's important to have a good representative sample because some samples can misrepresent the entire population.
Another issue has to do with the relationship between correlation and causation. Just because two variables are correlated does not mean that one variable causes the other. In order to draw the conclusion that one variable causes the other, further research might be needed such as controlling confounding variables and examining the causal mechanism.
License: CC BY-SA 4.0
