ABSTRACT

Presentation of statistical data Statistics is the study of the collection, organisation, analysis and interpretation of data. It deals with all aspects of this, including the planning of data collection in terms of the design of surveys and experiments. Statistics is applicable to a wide variety of academic disciplines, including natural and social sciences, engineering, government and business. Statistical methods can be used for summarising or describing a collection of data. Engineering statistics combines engineering and statistics. Design of experiments is a methodology for formulating scientific and engineering problems using statistical models. Quality control and process control use statistics as a tool to manage conformance to specifications of manufacturing processes and their products. Time and methods engineering use statistics to study repetitive operations in manufacturing in order to set standards and find optimum manufacturing procedures. Reliability engineering measures the ability of a system to perform for its intended function (and time) and has tools for improving performance. Probabilistic design involves the use of probability in product and system design. System identification uses statistical methods to build mathematical models of dynamical systems from measured data. System identification also includes the optimal design of experiments for efficiently generating informative data for fitting such models. This chapter introduces the presentation of statistical data.