Welcome to the Statistics Portal
Statistics is a mathematical science pertaining to the collection, analysis, interpretation or explanation, and presentation of data. It is applicable to a wide variety of academic disciplines, from the natural and social sciences to the humanities, government and business.
Statistical methods are used to summarize and describe a collection of data; this is called descriptive statistics. In addition, patterns in the data may be modeled in a way that accounts for randomness and uncertainty in the observations, and then used to draw inferences about the process or population being studied; this is called inferential statistics.
Statistics arose no later than the 18th century from the need of states to collect data on their people and economies, in order to administer them. The meaning broadened in the early 19th century to include the collection and analysis of data in general.
A likelihood function
( MLE) is a popular statistical method used for fitting a mathematical model to data. The modeling of real world data using estimation by maximum likelihood offers a way of tuning the free parameters of the model to provide a good fit. The method was pioneered by Sir Ronald A. Fisher between 1912 and 1922. For a fixed set of data and underlying probability model, maximum likelihood picks the values of the model parameters that make the data "more likely" than any other values of the parameters would make them. Maximum likelihood estimation gives a unique and easy way to determine solution in the case of the normal distribution and many other problems.
William Gosset
(1876–1937) is better known by his pen name Student and gave this name to Student's t-test and Student's t-distribution. He joined the Dublin brewery of Arthur Guinness & Son in 1899, where he applied his statistical knowledge both in the brewery and on the farm to the selection of the best yielding varieties of barley. Gosset's key 1908 papers addressed the brewer's concern with small samples. To prevent further disclosure of confidential information, Guinness prohibited its employees from publishing any papers regardless of the contained information, so Gosset used the pseudonym Student for his publications to avoid their detection by his employer.
Featured and good articles
A scatter plot is a type of mathematical diagram using Cartesian coordinates to display values for two variables for a set of data. The data is displayed as a collection of points, each having the value of one variable determining the position on the horizontal axis and the value of the other variable determining the position on the vertical axis. A scatter plot is also called a scatter chart, scatter diagram and scatter graph. This scatter plot shows the relationship between time between eruptions and the duration of the eruption for the Old Faithful Geyser in Yellowstone National Park, Wyoming, USA. This chart suggests there are generally two "types" of eruptions: short-wait-short-duration, and long-wait-long-duration.
- ...that according to Benford's law, the first digit from many real-life sources of data is 1 almost one third of the time?
- ...that the Law of Truly Large Numbers of Diaconis and Mosteller states that with a sample size large enough, any outrageous thing is likely to happen?
- ...that for the number of shuffles needed to randomize a deck, Persi Diaconis concluded that for good shuffling technique, the deck did not start to become random until five good riffle shuffles, and was truly random after seven, in the precise sense of variation distance described in Markov chain mixing time?
- ...that for many standard probability distributions, there are infinitely many outcomes in the sample space, so that attempting to define probabilities for all possible subsets of such spaces would cause difficulties for 'badly-behaved' sets such as those which are nonmeasurable?
- ... that Jan Piekałkiewicz, a leading Polish statistician, became the Polish Underground State's Government Delegate, and died at the hands of Nazi Germany?
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