ABSTRACT
One of the most useful skills that a reliability specialist can develop is the ability to convert a mass (mess?) of data into a form suitable for meaningful analysis. Raw numbers by themselves are not useful; what is needed is a distillation of the data into information. In this chapter, we discuss several important concepts and techniques from the —eld
of descriptive statistics. These methods are used to extract a relevant summary from collected data. The goal is to describe and understand the random variability that exists in all measurements of real world phenomena and experimental data. These concepts and techniques are basic and are applied to reliability data throughout the book. The topics we cover include populations and samples; frequency functions, histograms,
and cumulative frequency functions; the population cumulative distribution function (CDF) and probability density function (PDF); elementary probability concepts, random variables, population parameters, and sample estimates; theoretical population shape models; and data simulation.
