ABSTRACT
This chapter introduces students to the topic of quantitative analysis, including finding good data, examining data for their potential meaning and doing basic statistical operations. In general data are divided into two big groups: categorical and quantitative. Data are all around us. They come from all kinds of sources – from surveys to social media "analytics" to scientific studies to analysis of movie posters or facial expressions. The Central Limits Theorem is perhaps the most important notion in statistical analysis. It says, in the simplest terms, that for any population most elements — defined as people, cars, trees, virtually anything — will cluster in the center, with smaller and smaller numbers trending toward the outer edges. Generalizing the results of sampling to a larger group of individuals or a bigger situation is one goal of statistical inference, which is defined as providing methods for drawing conclusions about a population from sample data.
