Question: Why Statistics ?
Answer: Statistics is used for decision making often to bring certainty to the decision.
Question: Why do inferential statistics ?
Answer : Let’s say I want to find the no of brown ducks in the population i.e Fig 1.
Question : Oh.. this is tough. It’s time consuming and takes a lot of time and hence expensive? How do we make it easier ?
Answer: What if we make the task easier by only counting over a small area. Umm.. nice idea.. Let’s do that…
Question : Yes this is easier to count here. Cool… But what is the con ?
Answer : Yes, it definitely is easier but the con is we slightly loose accuracy here because we only are taking a sample here. This exactly is the inferential statistics. The process of making inference about the population based on the small sample size which we use just because the small sample size makes the whole process feasible.
Since performing a test on the whole population is very very expensive and infeasible, we use inferential statistics to perform the test.
Question : So how do you do the inferential statistics ?
Answer : We perform the test on the sample of the population. this is less expensive and feasible.
Question: Awesome, Is there any problem to this approach?
Answer : Actually, there is. There is a lot of problem with this approach and we have to be very careful in numerous areas i.e
1. Sample population different than actual population e.g Including college students only to infer the results for the whole population
2. Sample size too small.
Question : What are the consequences of using samples ?
Answer: In inferential statistics since, we use the information for the sample to infer the conclusion about the population, it means that there is no guarantee but only the probability of being correct.
[Contd]