May 2019
Beginner
192 pages
4h 8m
English
Content preview from Statistics Essentials For Dummies
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Chapter 1
Statistics in a Nutshell
IN THIS CHAPTER
Getting the big picture of the field of statistics
Overviewing the steps of the scientific method
Seeing the role of statistics at each step
The most common description of statistics is that it’s the process of analyzing data — number crunching, in a sense. But statistics is not just about analyzing the data. It’s about the whole process of using the scientific method to answer questions and make decisions. That process involves designing studies, collecting good data, describing the data with numbers and graphs, analyzing the data, and then making conclusions. In this chapter, I review each of these steps and show where statistics plays the all-important role.
Designing Studies
Once a research question is defined, the next step is designing a study in order to answer that question. This amounts to figuring out what process you’ll use to get the data you need. In this section, I overview the two major types of studies: observational studies and experiments.
Surveys
An observational study is one in which data are collected on individuals in a way that doesn’t affect them. The most common observational study is the survey. ...
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I'm always learning. So when I got on to O'Reilly, I was like a kid in a candy store. There are playlists. There are answers. There's on-demand training. It's worth its weight in gold, in terms of what it allows me to do.