Statistics provides methods for
1. Design: Planning and carrying out research studies.
2. Description: Summarizing and exploring data.
3. Inference: Making predictions and generalizing about phenomena represented by the data.
Furthermore, statistics is the science of dealing with uncertain phenomenon
and events. Statistics in practice is applied successfully to study the effectiveness of medical treatments, the reaction of consumers to television advertising, the attitudes of young people toward sex and marriage, and much
more. It’s safe to say that nowadays statistics is used in every field of science.
Example 1.1 (Statistics in practice). Consider the following problems:
–agricultural problem: Is new grain seed or fertilizer more productive?
–medical problem: What is the right amount of dosage of drug to treatment?
–political science: How accurate are the gallups and opinion polls?
–economics: What will be the unemployment rate next year?
–technical problem: How to improve quality of