Stats Terms

Individual

an individual is a person you’re studying or trying to gain more information about

Variable

a variable is what you’re measuring or observing about the individual

Define Descriptive statistics

collecting and organizing data

inferential statistics

analyzing and interpreting data

Qualitative variable

A qualitative variable describes an individual by placing the individual into a category or group, such as left-handed or right-handed.

quantitiative

A quantitative variable has a value or numerical measurement for which operations such as addition or averaging make sense.

Population

set of all values of the variable for the entire group of individuals

Sample

a subset from the population. looks just like the population and is meant to represent the population, however, it lacks as much data.

parameter

a number calculated from the statistic. often denoted with a greek letter. This number is fixed, and something you wanna find.

Statistic

a number calculated from the sample. Usually denoted with letters from the Latin alphabet, though sometimes there is a Greek letter with a ˆ (called a hat) above it. Since you can find samples, they are readily known, but they change depending on the sample. It is used to estimate the parameter value.

Ration Data

Difference between measurements, true zero exists (Height, age, Weekly food spending)

Interval data

Differences between measurements but no true zero (temperature in Fahrenheit, Standardized exam score)s

Ordinal

Ordered Categories, rankings, order, scaling(Service quality rating, student letter grades)

Nominal Data

Categories with no order or direction (Marital status, type of car owned)