Introduction to Statistics

Abstract

We live in a big world and constantly face the necessity of making generalized conclusions about it based on limited observations and measurements. For example, a retail store would like to understand consumer purchasing patterns based on what their customers have purchased in the past. Most likely, the actual purchases at a store reflect the general purchase patters but only to a certain degree. What can we say about such patterns in general? Health-care organizations would like to learn what major health problems the population has, based on the data about patients who received medical treatment with that organization. In politics, national polls include a limited number of respondents but are supposed to reflect the opinion of the entire population. The bottom line is that statistics deals with measurements on a limited number of objects of interest and has a goal of generalizing the results of such measurements to all objects of that category.