Lesson 1 Summary Section
The goal of statistics is to make inferences about the population based on the sample. Therefore, knowing how the sample is obtained is essential to understand. We also have to know what conclusions we can make based on the type of study we have.
Once we gather the data, we need to summarize it in order to make sense of what we have. How we summarize the data depends on what type of variable we have. For qualitative variables, we can summarize using frequencies and proportions. For quantitative data, we can summarize the data using various measures of center, variability, and position.
For both types of variables, quantitative and qualitative, we can produce graphs to help us visualize the data.
Collecting and summarizing data (numerically and graphically) help us understand what is going on in the sample. The goal is to understand what is happening in the population from that sample (i.e. inference). To begin inference, we need to first learn about probability. Probability is discussed in the next Lesson.