ABSTRACT

This chapter introduces in an informal way some of the statistical jargon that readers will encounter throughout the book. Inferential statistics is the art and science of interpreting evidence in the face of uncertainty. The parameter of interest in a statistical study is usually a particular feature of the distribution. By a symmetric distribution we mean a distribution where, in the example of student income, the percentage of students who exceed a certain income in excess of the mean is the same as the percentage of students who fall below the same level of income below the mean. We are interested about the mean of the distribution in the real world, but we will conduct our inferences (at least in part) by looking at the sample world, i.e., the sampling distribution of the sample mean.