ABSTRACT
This chapter considers aspects of statistics that are relevant to data analysis. If you need more details than are presented here, there are many statistics textbooks available. A population is the totality of possible values that a particular physical value can attain in an experiment, whereas a sample is a subset of the population. Variables such as the mean or the median, which summarize some aspect of the population or the sample, are termed statistics. There is also the possibility that the population is composed of discrete elements, though this is not common in physical science and engineering. Covariance and correlation are important when people want to assess whether the variations in two variables are correlated, i.e., whether they move up and down together in some sense. A histogram is useful for visualizing the general distribution of a univariate data set, i.e., a data set in which there is only one variable, such as the length of an object.
