ABSTRACT
In many elementary statistics courses, the subject matter is somewhat arbitrarily divided into two categories, called descriptive and inductive statistics. Descriptive statistics usually relates only to the calculation or presentation of figures (visual or conceptual) to summarize or characterize a set of data. For such procedures, no assumptions are made or implied, and there is no question of legitimacy of techniques. The descriptive figures may be a mean, median, variance, range, histogram, etc. Each of these figures summarizes a set of numbers in its own unique way; each is a distinguishable and well-defined characterization of data. If such data constitute a random sample from a certain population, the sample represents the population in miniature and any set of descriptive statistics provides some information regarding this universe. The term parameter is generally employed to connote a characteristic of the population. A parameter is often an 2unspecified constant appearing in a family of probability distributions, but the word can also be interpreted in a broader sense to include almost all descriptions of population characteristics within a family.
