Basics of statistics

The field of statistics is all about using mathematical procedures to summarize the raw facts and figures of a dataset in some meaningful way so that it makes sense to you. This includes, and is not limited to: gathering data, analyzing it, interpreting it, and representing it.

The field of statistics exists mainly because it is usually impossible to collect data for the entire population. So using statistical techniques, we estimate the population parameters using the sample statistics by addressing the uncertainties.

In this section, we will cover some basic statistics and analysis techniques on which we are going to build up our complete understanding of the concepts covered in this book.

The study of statistics can be broadly categorized into two main branches:

• Descriptive statistics

• Inferential statistics

The following diagram depicts these two terms and shows how we estimate the population parameters from samples:

Before we get started on these, it is important to get...