Preamble to MTL390What is Statistics? As per Wikipedia, it is a branch of mathematics dealing with collection, analysis, interpretation, presentation and organization of data. So, one thing is very clear to us that statistics is something where we deal with data. This has become very important in this era of big data, when data is in abundance and we need to learn from this dataFirst Written reference Historically the term Statistics was used first in English by Sir John Sinclair * Scottish politician * Prolific writer * Written 21 volumes on Statistical Account of Scotland 1791 to 99 So, it is more than 200 years that the word Statistics is being used in EnglishFirst Written reference Historically the term Statistics was used first in English by Sir John Sinclair * Scottish politician * Prolific writer * Written 21 volumes on Statistical Account of Scotland 1791 tto 99 So, it is more than 200 years that the word §fatistics is being used in English German 1749 Statistik - was used by Gotfried Etymologically, the term came from the word “states” At state level government was collecting data which was used by government and administrative bodies for tax calculation etc.Statistics essentially has two parts: 1) Descriptive statistics: To provide a summary of the data. I assume people know some basics of descriptive statistics comprising a) Data visualization - 2D or 3D, scatter plot, bar chart, pie chart, histogram, box-plot these are basic data visualization techniques b) Measure of central tendency Different Means, Median, Mode each having pros and cons. E.g Mean gets affected by extreme value — not Mode or Median Given observations Mean is unique — Not Mode or Medianc) Measure of dispersion Variance, Mean Absolute Deviation, Range, Inter Quartile Deviation d) Skewness Measure of asymmetry e) Kurtosis vangea>0 Measure of Peakedness / Tailedness Leptokurtic, Mescokurtic. Platykurti f) Measure of Association nop Correlation, Kendall’s tauOur aim here is to study Inferential StatisticsWhat is difference between a Statistic and a Parameter ? A parameter is a number describing a whole population (e.g., population Mean, population variance) A statistic is a function computed on the basis of a sample e..g. Sample mean. The goal is to understand characteristics of populations by finding parameters . With inferential statistics, we can use sample statistics to make an estimate about population parameters.