Chapter 15

Knowing When Not to Trust Your Data

IN THIS CHAPTER

check Working with samples

check Testing hypotheses

check Understanding confidence intervals

check Using the normal distribution

check 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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