Statistics is the discipline that concerns the collection, organization, analysis, interpretation, and presentation of data. In applying statistics to a scientific, industrial, or social problem, it is conventional to begin with a statistical population or a statistical model to be studied. Populations can be diverse groups of people or objects such as "all people living in a country" or "every atom composing a crystal". Statistics deals with every aspect of data, including the planning of data collection in terms of the design of surveys and experiments.
Accuracy and precision are two measures of observational error. Accuracy is how close a given set of measurements are to their true value, while precision is how close the measurements are to each other.
Social statistics is the use of statistical measurement systems to study human behavior in a social environment. This can be accomplished through polling a group of people, evaluating a subset of data obtained about a group of people, or by observation and statistical analysis of a set of data that relates to people and their behaviors.
There are two main uses of the term calibration in statistics that denote special types of statistical inference problems. Calibration can mean
Level of measurement or scale of measure is a classification that describes the nature of information within the values assigned to variables. Psychologist Stanley Smith Stevens developed the best-known classification with four levels, or scales, of measurement: nominal, ordinal, interval, and ratio. This framework of distinguishing levels of measurement originated in psychology and has since had a complex history, being adopted and extended in some disciplines and by some scholars, and criticized or rejected by others. Other classifications include those by Mosteller and Tukey, and by Chrisman.
A receiver operating characteristic curve, or ROC curve, is a graphical plot that illustrates the performance of a binary classifier model at varying threshold values.
In statistics, classification is the problem of identifying which of a set of categories (sub-populations) an observation belongs to. Examples are assigning a given email to the "spam" or "non-spam" class, and assigning a diagnosis to a given patient based on observed characteristics of the patient.
The law of truly large numbers, attributed to Persi Diaconis and Frederick Mosteller, states that with a large enough number of independent samples, any highly implausible result is likely to be observed. Because we never find it notable when likely events occur, we highlight unlikely events and notice them more. The law is often used to falsify different pseudo-scientific claims; as such, it is sometimes criticized by fringe scientists.
In predictive analytics, data science, machine learning and related fields, concept drift or drift is an evolution of data that invalidates the data model. It happens when the statistical properties of the target variable, which the model is trying to predict, change over time in unforeseen ways. This causes problems because the predictions become less accurate as time passes. Drift detection and drift adaptation are of paramount importance in the fields that involve dynamically changing data and data models.
Sir Adrian Frederick Melhuish Smith, PRS is a British statistician who is chief executive of the Alan Turing Institute and president of the Royal Society.
Sir Roy Malcolm Anderson is a leading international authority on the epidemiology and control of infectious diseases. He is the author, with Robert May, of the most highly cited book in this field, entitled Infectious Diseases of Humans: Dynamics and Control. His early work was on the population ecology of infectious agents before focusing on the epidemiology and control of human infections. His published research includes studies of the major viral, bacterial and parasitic infections of humans, wildlife and livestock. This has included major studies on HIV, SARS, foot and mouth disease, bovine tuberculosis, bovine spongiform encephalopathy (BSE), influenza A, antibiotic resistant bacteria, the neglected tropical diseases and most recently COVID-19. Anderson is the author of over 650 peer-reviewed scientific articles with an h-index of 125.
Some approaches in the branch of historic metrology are highly speculative and can be qualified as pseudoscience.
David John Bartholomew was a British statistician who was president of the Royal Statistical Society between 1993 and 1995. He was professor of statistics at the London School of Economics between 1973 and 1996.
Optimal Discriminant Analysis (ODA) and the related classification tree analysis (CTA) are exact statistical methods that maximize predictive accuracy. For any specific sample and exploratory or confirmatory hypothesis, optimal discriminant analysis (ODA) identifies the statistical model that yields maximum predictive accuracy, assesses the exact Type I error rate, and evaluates potential cross-generalizability. Optimal discriminant analysis may be applied to > 0 dimensions, with the one-dimensional case being referred to as UniODA and the multidimensional case being referred to as MultiODA. Optimal discriminant analysis is an alternative to ANOVA and regression analysis.
Statistics education is the practice of teaching and learning of statistics, along with the associated scholarly research.
Nancy Margaret Reid is a Canadian theoretical statistician. She is a professor at the University of Toronto where she holds a Canada Research Chair in Statistical Theory. In 2015 Reid became Director of the Canadian Institute for Statistical Sciences.
David Tudor Jones is a Professor of Bioinformatics, and Head of Bioinformatics Group in the University College London. He is also the director in Bloomsbury Center for Bioinformatics, which is a joint Research Centre between UCL and Birkbeck, University of London and which also provides bioinformatics training and support services to biomedical researchers. In 2013, he is a member of editorial boards for PLoS ONE, BioData Mining, Advanced Bioinformatics, Chemical Biology & Drug Design, and Protein: Structure, Function and Bioinformatics.
Data science is an interdisciplinary academic field that uses statistics, scientific computing, scientific methods, processes, algorithms and systems to extract or extrapolate knowledge and insights from potentially noisy, structured, or unstructured data.
David L. Banks is an American statistician at Duke University.
Nicholas Irving Fisher is an Australian statistician and entrepreneur. He was a statistical researcher at the CSIRO for over 30 years and has founded the analytics company ValueMetrics Australia. He has contributed to the development and applications of directional statistics in geosciences, and statistical methods for quality improvement, specifically performance measurement for enterprises.
