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.
Statistical inference is the process of using data analysis to infer properties of an underlying distribution of probability. Inferential statistical analysis infers properties of a population, for example by testing hypotheses and deriving estimates. It is assumed that the observed data set is sampled from a larger population.
The method of least squares is a parameter estimation method in regression analysis based on minimizing the sum of the squares of the residuals made in the results of each individual equation.
In statistics, point estimation involves the use of sample data to calculate a single value which is to serve as a "best guess" or "best estimate" of an unknown population parameter. More formally, it is the application of a point estimator to the data to obtain a point estimate.
Nonparametric statistics is a type of statistical analysis that makes minimal assumptions about the underlying distribution of the data being studied. Often these models are infinite-dimensional, rather than finite dimensional, as is parametric statistics. Nonparametric statistics can be used for descriptive statistics or statistical inference. Nonparametric tests are often used when the assumptions of parametric tests are evidently violated.
In statistics and optimization, errors and residuals are two closely related and easily confused measures of the deviation of an observed value of an element of a statistical sample from its "true value". The error of an observation is the deviation of the observed value from the true value of a quantity of interest. The residual is the difference between the observed value and the estimated value of the quantity of interest. The distinction is most important in regression analysis, where the concepts are sometimes called the regression errors and regression residuals and where they lead to the concept of studentized residuals. In econometrics, "errors" are also called disturbances.
Mathematical statistics is the application of probability theory, a branch of mathematics, to statistics, as opposed to techniques for collecting statistical data. Specific mathematical techniques which are used for this include mathematical analysis, linear algebra, stochastic analysis, differential equations, and measure theory.
In statistics, the Wald test assesses constraints on statistical parameters based on the weighted distance between the unrestricted estimate and its hypothesized value under the null hypothesis, where the weight is the precision of the estimate. Intuitively, the larger this weighted distance, the less likely it is that the constraint is true. While the finite sample distributions of Wald tests are generally unknown, it has an asymptotic χ2-distribution under the null hypothesis, a fact that can be used to determine statistical significance.
This glossary of statistics and probability is a list of definitions of terms and concepts used in the mathematical sciences of statistics and probability, their sub-disciplines, and related fields. For additional related terms, see Glossary of mathematics and Glossary of experimental design.
In statistics, resampling is the creation of new samples based on one observed sample. Resampling methods are:
- Permutation tests
- Bootstrapping
- Cross validation
Bootstrapping is any test or metric that uses random sampling with replacement, and falls under the broader class of resampling methods. Bootstrapping assigns measures of accuracy to sample estimates. This technique allows estimation of the sampling distribution of almost any statistic using random sampling methods.
The topic of heteroskedasticity-consistent (HC) standard errors arises in statistics and econometrics in the context of linear regression and time series analysis. These are also known as heteroskedasticity-robust standard errors, Eicker–Huber–White standard errors, to recognize the contributions of Friedhelm Eicker, Peter J. Huber, and Halbert White.
In probability and statistics, an elliptical distribution is any member of a broad family of probability distributions that generalize the multivariate normal distribution. Intuitively, in the simplified two and three dimensional case, the joint distribution forms an ellipse and an ellipsoid, respectively, in iso-density plots.
In statistics, linear regression is a statistical model which estimates the linear relationship between a scalar response and one or more explanatory variables. The case of one explanatory variable is called simple linear regression; for more than one, the process is called multiple linear regression. This term is distinct from multivariate linear regression, where multiple correlated dependent variables are predicted, rather than a single scalar variable. If the explanatory variables are measured with error then errors-in-variables models are required, also known as measurement error models.
The following outline is provided as an overview of and topical guide to machine learning:
Probabilistic numerics is an active field of study at the intersection of applied mathematics, statistics, and machine learning centering on the concept of uncertainty in computation. In probabilistic numerics, tasks in numerical analysis such as finding numerical solutions for integration, linear algebra, optimization and simulation and differential equations are seen as problems of statistical, probabilistic, or Bayesian inference.
In statistics, a sequence of random variables is homoscedastic if all its random variables have the same finite variance; this is also known as homogeneity of variance. The complementary notion is called heteroscedasticity, also known as heterogeneity of variance. The spellings homoskedasticity and heteroskedasticity are also frequently used. Assuming a variable is homoscedastic when in reality it is heteroscedastic results in unbiased but inefficient point estimates and in biased estimates of standard errors, and may result in overestimating the goodness of fit as measured by the Pearson coefficient.
