ABSTRACT
This chapter discusses statistics at the level needed for radiation measurements and analysis of their results. People who perform experiments need to know statistics for analysis of experiments that are probabilistic in nature, treatment of uncertainties, and fitting a function to the experimental data. In the language of probability, an “event” is an outcome of one or more experiments or trials and is defined by the experimenter. When an experiment is repeated many times under identical conditions, the results of the measurement will not necessarily be identical. There are many such laws governing different types of measurements. Both the binomial and Poisson distributions apply to discrete variables, whereas most of the random variables involved in experiments are continuous. The normal distribution is the most important distribution for applications in measurements. In every radiation measurement, it is extremely important to perform it in such a way that the result is determined with the minimum possible uncertainty.
