Portal:Statistics

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Statistics is a mathematical science pertaining to the collection, analysis, interpretation or explanation, and presentation of data. It is applicable to a wide variety of academic disciplines, from the natural and social sciences to the humanities, government and business.

Statistical methods are used to summarize and describe a collection of data; this is called descriptive statistics. In addition, patterns in the data may be modeled in a way that accounts for randomness and uncertainty in the observations, and then used to draw inferences about the process or population being studied; this is called inferential statistics. Mathematical statistics is concerned with the theoretical basis of the subject. There are a number of categories of statistics that have been developed to address statistical problems in many natural and social sciences, including actuarial science, biostatistics, demography, econometrics, epidemiology, geostatistics, and operations research.

Statistics arose, no later than the 18th century, from the need of states to collect data on their people and economies, in order to administer them. The meaning broadened in the early 19th century to include the collection and analysis of data in general.

Because of its origins in government and its data-centric world view, statistics is considered to be not a subfield of mathematics but rather a distinct field that uses mathematics; some class it as a sister formal science. Its mathematical foundations were laid in the 17th and 18th centuries with the development of probability theory. The method of least squares was invented around the turn of the 19th century by several authors. New techniques of probability and statistics have been in continual development. Modern computers have expedited large-scale statistical computation, and have also made possible new methods that would be impractical to perform manually.

The word statistics can either be singular or plural. In its singular form, statistics refers to the mathematical science discussed in this article. In its plural form, statistics is the plural of the word statistic, which refers to a quantity (such as a mean) calculated from a set of data.

Selected article

The margin of error is a statistic expressing the amount of random sampling error in a survey's results. The larger the margin of error, the less confidence one should have that the poll's reported results are close to the "true" figures; that is, the figures for the whole population.

The margin of error is usually defined as the radius of a confidence interval for a particular statistic from a survey. One example is the percent of people who prefer product A versus product B. When a single, global margin of error is reported for a survey, it refers to the maximum margin of error for all reported percentages using the full sample from the survey. If the statistic is a percentage, this maximum margin of error can be calculated as the radius of the confidence interval for a reported percentage of 50%.

The margin of error has been described as an "absolute" quantity, equal to a confidence interval radius for the statistic. For example, if the true value is 50 percentage points, and the statistic has a confidence interval radius of 5 percentage points, then we say the margin of error is 5 percentage points. As another example, if the true value is 50 people, and the statistic has a confidence interval radius of 5 people, then we might say the margin of error is 5 people.

Selected biography

William Sealy Gosset (1876–1937) is better known by his pen name Student and gave this name to Student's t-test and Student's t-distribution. He joined the Dublin brewery of Arthur Guinness & Son in 1899, where he applied his statistical knowledge both in the brewery to the selection of the best yielding varieties of barley. Gosset's key 1908 papers addressed the brewer's concern with small samples. To prevent further disclosure of confidential information, Guinness prohibited its employees from publishing any papers regardless of the contained information, so Gosset used the pseudonym Student for his publications to avoid their detection by his employer.

Featured and good articles

These are featured or good articles on statistics topics.

Actuary Infinite monkey theorem Monty Hall problem

Ars Conjectandi Maximum likelihood Maximum spacing estimation

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The Statistics WikiProject is the center for improving statistics articles on Wikipedia. If you would like to participate, please visit the project page, where you can join the project and see a list of open tasks.

Related projects: Mathematics • Computer science • Cryptography • Game theory • Numbers • Probability

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A scatter plot is a type of display using Cartesian coordinates to display values for two variables for a set of data. The data is displayed as a collection of points, each having the value of one variable determining the position on the horizontal axis and the value of the other variable determining the position on the vertical axis. A scatter plot is also called a scatter chart, scatter diagram and scatter graph. This scaterplot shows the relationship between time between eruptions and the duration of the eruption for the Old Faithful geyser in Yellowstone National Park, Wyoming, USA. This chart suggests there are generally two "types" of eruptions: short-wait-short-duration, and long-wait-long-duration.

Did you know?

• ...that one result of the birthday problem is that among a group of 23 (or more) randomly chosen people, there is more than 50% probability that some pair of them will both have been born on the same day of the year?
• ...that the term bias is not necessarily pejorative in statistics, since biased estimators may have desirable properties (such as a smaller mean squared error than any unbiased estimator), and that in extreme cases the only unbiased estimators are not even within the convex hull of the parameter space?
• ...that William Sealy Gosset published under the pseudonym Student in order to avoid detection by his employer, and so his most famous achievement is now referred to as Student's t-distribution, which might otherwise have been Gosset's t-distribution?
• ...that in 1747, by dividing 12 men suffering from scurvy into six pairs and giving each group different additions to their basic diet for a period of two weeks, the surgeon James Lind conducted one of the first controlled experiments?
• ...that the Cauchy distribution is an example of a distribution which has no mean, variance or higher moments defined?

                             

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