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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 can be used to summarize or 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. Both descriptive and inferential statistics comprise applied statistics. There is also a discipline called mathematical statistics, which is concerned with the theoretical basis of the subject.

The word statistics is also the plural of statistic (singular), which refers to the result of applying a statistical algorithm to a set of data, as in economic statistics, crime statistics, etc.

  

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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.

  

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William Edwards Deming (October 14, 1900—December 20, 1993) was an American statistician, professor, author, lecturer, and consultant. Deming is widely credited with improving production in the United States during World War II, although he is perhaps best known for his work in Japan. There, from 1950 onward he taught top management how to improve design (and thus service), product quality, testing and sales (the last through global markets). Deming made a significant contribution to Japan's later renown for innovative high-quality products and its economic power. He is regarded as having had more impact upon Japanese manufacturing and business than any other individual not of Japanese heritage. Despite being considered something of a hero in Japan, he was only beginning to win widespread recognition in the U.S. at the time of his death.

  

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The Statistics WikiProject is the center for improving statistics articles on Wikipedia. Join the discussion on the project's talk page.

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

  

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Anscombe's quartet comprises four datasets which have identical simple statistical properties (mean, standard deviation, correlation, etc), yet which are revealed to be very different when inspected graphically. Each dataset consists of eleven (x,y) points. They were constructed in 1973 by the statistician F.J. Anscombe to demonstrate the importance of graphing data before analyzing it, and of the effect of outliers on the statistical properties of a dataset.

  

Did you know?

• ...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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In the news

2008 April 21: Australian Bureau of Statistics faces budget cut April 7: Wikinews interviews Australian Statistician Brian Pink 2005 February 12: New Zealand Recorded Crime Statistics available online February 1: Brazil forbids previous release of statistical data

  

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