Chapter 15
Knowing When Not to Trust Your Data
IN THIS CHAPTER
Working with samples
Testing hypotheses
Understanding confidence intervals
Using the normal distribution
Calculating Z-scores
What is inferential statistics and who uses it? Inferential statistics is the practice of collecting and analyzing numerical data for the purpose of making scientific inferences from a representative sample to a population. Government agencies, business analysts, market researchers, health researchers, survey companies, education researchers, and many others use inference.
In this chapter, you discover the benefits and potential limitations of sampling. You then find out about hypothesis testing so you can learn the logic behind performing statistical tests. From there, we describe distributions, which provide insight into statistical theory and will lead you to calculating z-scores, so that you can identify the position of any data point on a distribution.
Sampling
Descriptive statistics, which ...
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