Gary Chan is a maths tutor at OPCentro Tuition. He is currently running a couple of maths lessons for year 11 and 12 students and providing online statistics help and consultation to university students.
Many first year pharmacy students fear it. Most second year psychology students dread it. What is it? It is statistics -- a branch of applied mathematics that concerns with
- Experimental design and data collection
- Data analysis and data summarization
- Estimating the present and predicting the future
Putting it in a simpler way, statistics is the study of data collection and analysis. Through better experimental designs or sampling methods, statisticians help improve the quality of data so that we can make more accurate conclusions about the questions are under investigation. Statistical methods can be used to describe the main features of a collection of data in quantitative terms; this is called descriptive statistics. However, the power of statistics does not just lie in its ability to summarize data; what makes statistics fascinating is its ability of making inferences and prediction with a certain degree of accuracy. For example, if we want to see if smoking would cause cancer, we just need to carry out an experiment or survey with 30 to 40 participants and then analyse the data. We can then make a general statement about the relationship between smoking and cancer (making inference). Insurance company can then use the results to predict the risk of cancer of smokers (making prediction) and determine their insurance policy.
Who would use statistics? To what area is statistics applied?
A wide range of careers use statistics regularly. Medical researchers use statistics to determine if a particular gene is related to Parkinson’s disease; Insurance companies use statistics to formulate their insurance policy; Psychologist use statistics to find out the risk factors of depression; economists use statistics to estimate the GDP of Australia, etc. Indeed, statistics is widely used across different disciplines, and that’s why your evil lecturer forces you to study statistics.
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