Introduction to Statistics

Summary statistics gives you the tools you need to describe your data. In this chapter, you'll explore summary statistics including mean, median, and standard deviation, and learn how to accurately interpret them. You'll also develop your critical thinking skills, allowing you to choose the best summary statistics for your data.

Probability underpins a large part of statistics, where it is used to calculate the chance of events occurring. You'll work with real-world sales data and learn how data with different values can be interpreted as a probability distribution. You'll find out about discrete and continuous probability distributions, including the discovery of the normal distribution and how it occurs frequently in natural events!

It's time to explore more probability distributions. You'll learn about the binomial distribution for visualizing the probability of binary outcomes, and one of the most important distributions in statistics, the normal distribution. You'll see how distributions can be described by their shape, along with discovering the Poisson distribution and its role in calculating the probabilities of events occuring over time. You'll also gain an understanding of the central limit theorem!

In the final chapter, you'll be introduced to hypothesis testing and how it can be used to accurately draw conclusions about a population. You'll discover correlation and how it can be used to quantify a linear relationship between two variables. You'll find out about experimental design techniques such as randomization and blinding. You'll also learn about concepts used to minimize the risk of drawing the wrong conclusion about the results of hypothesis tests!