Inferential Statistics
It’s a part of Statistics that, based on a small sample infers predictions about the population
- Descriptive Statistics is another part that just describes samples and doesn’t infer anything about the general population
“Statistical Inference” is concerned mainly with assessing the quality of parameter estimates
- using some methods we estimate parameters and build statistical models from the sample
- and we want to know how good the estimates/models are
Variability in Estimates
- We estimate the parameters based on sampled data
- So with different samples (from the same population) we get different estimates of the same parameter
- A one-number estimate of some population parameter is called Point Estimate
- The distribution of this parameter estimate is called Sampling Distribution
- and the measure of variability is called Standard Error
Main tools
Sources
- http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Statistical_inference
- OpenIntro Statistics (book)