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Statistics as a field of study can be divided into two main branches descriptive and inferential statistics. Inferential statistics involves studying a sample of data.
The two types of statistics have some important differences.
Inferential versus descriptive statistics. Descriptive statistics use summary statistics graphs and tables to describe a data set. This is useful for helping us gain a quick and easy understanding of a data set without pouring over all of the individual data values. Inferential statistics use samples to draw inferences.
Descriptive statistics describe what is going on in a population or data set. Inferential statistics by contrast allow scientists to take findings from a sample group and generalize them to a larger population. The two types of statistics have some important differences.
Several descriptive statistics are often used at one time to give a full picture of the data. Descriptive statistics are just descriptive. They do not involve generalizing beyond the data at hand.
Generalizing from our data to another set of cases is the business of inferential statistics which youll be studying in another section. To understand the simple difference between descriptive and inferential statistics all you need to remember is that descriptive statistics summarize your current dataset and inferential statistics aim to draw conclusions about an additional population outside of your dataset. Perhaps these concepts are most easily explained with some examples.
Descriptive and inferential statistics are two broad categories in the field of statisticsIn this blog post I show you how both types of statistics are important for different purposes. Interestingly some of the statistical measures are similar but the goals and methodologies are very different. Descriptive vs inferential statistics is one such age-old debate.
Statistics as a field of study can be divided into two main branches descriptive and inferential statistics. Today in most research conducted on groups of people both descriptive and inferential methods are used. It is important to be able to compare and contrast descriptive and inferential statistics with respect to their different goals and typical statistical quantities.
Descriptive Statistics use numerical summaries and statistical graphs to provide key features of the collected data. Inferential Statistics use data to make statements about unknown population parameters. Inferential statistics involves studying a sample of data.
The term implies that information has to be inferred from the presented data. A sample of the data is considered studied and analyzed. Unlike descriptive statistics this data analysis can extend to a similar larger group and can be visually represented by means of graphic elements.
Descriptive Statistics Inferential Statistics. It gives information about raw data which describes the data in some manner. It makes inference about population using data drawn from the population.
It helps in organizing analyzing and to present data in a meaningful manner. It allows us to compare data make hypothesis and predictions. Descriptive Statistics is a discipline which is concerned with describing the population under study.
Inferential Statistics is a type of statistics. That focuses on drawing conclusions about the population on the basis of sample analysis and observation. Descriptive Statistics collects organises analyzes and presents data in a meaningful way.
Descriptive and Inferential Statistics 3 The Department of Statistics and Data Sciences The University of Texas at Austin This tutorial describes the use of SPSS to obtain descriptive and inferential statistics. In the first section you will be introduced to procedures used to obtain several descriptive statistics. The primary difference between descriptive and inferential statistics is that descriptive statistics measure for definitive measurement while inferential statistics note the margin of error of research performed.
Youll need to account for the deadlines you have for research and development to choose which statistic is more viable for you. It simply describes or organizes data regarding the population under study it does not draw conclusions. It extrapolates data to a whole population using a smaller representative sample allowing you to make predictions and draw conclusions.
It does not use probabilities. Descriptive statistics are used to describe the general conditions and characteristics of the data while inferential statistics are used to draw conclusions for. We have seen that descriptive statistics provide information about our immediate group of data.
For example we could calculate the mean and standard deviation of the exam marks for the 100 students and this could provide valuable information about this group of 100 students.