1.2 Types of Statistical Applications
“Statistics” means “numerical descriptions” to most people. Monthly housing starts, the failure rate of liver transplants, and the proportion of African-Americans who feel brutalized by local police all represent statistical descriptions of large sets of data collected on some phenomenon. (Later, in Section 1.4, we learn that not all data is numerical in nature.) Often the data are selected from some larger set of data whose characteristics we wish to estimate. We call this selection process sampling. For example, you might collect the ages of a sample of customers who shop for a particular product online to estimate the average age of all customers who shop online for the product. Then you could use your ...
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