Overview

Statistics provides a theoretical framework for analyzing numerical data and for drawing inferences from such data. Statistics uses the concept of probability—the likelihood that something will happen—to analyze data that are produced by probabilistic processes or to express the uncertainty in the inferences it draws.

In the first part of the twentieth century statisticians elaborated a number of theoretical frameworks within which statistical methods can be evaluated and compared. This led to a number of schools of statistical inference that disagree on basic principles and about the reliability of certain methods. Users of statistics are often happily unaware of these disagreements, and are taught a hybrid mixture of various approaches that may serve them satisfactorily in their practices.

Background

In the course of the nineteenth century huge masses of data were gathered by state agencies...