Econometrics is an application of statistical methods to economic data in order to give empirical content to economic relationships. More precisely, it is "the quantitative analysis of actual economic phenomena based on the concurrent development of theory and observation, related by appropriate methods of inference". An introductory economics textbook describes econometrics as allowing economists "to sift through mountains of data to extract simple relationships". Jan Tinbergen is one of the two founding fathers of econometrics. The other, Ragnar Frisch, also coined the term in the sense in which it is used today.
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 theory of statistics provides a basis for the whole range of techniques, in both study design and data analysis, that are used within applications of statistics. The theory covers approaches to statistical-decision problems and to statistical inference, and the actions and deductions that satisfy the basic principles stated for these different approaches. Within a given approach, statistical theory gives ways of comparing statistical procedures; it can find a best possible procedure within a given context for given statistical problems, or can provide guidance on the choice between alternative procedures.
A statistical hypothesis test is a method of statistical inference used to decide whether the data at hand sufficiently support a particular hypothesis. Hypothesis testing allows us to make probabilistic statements about population parameters.
In statistics, interval estimation is the use of sample data to estimate an interval of possible values of a parameter of interest. This is in contrast to point estimation, which gives a single value.
In computer science, computational learning theory is a subfield of artificial intelligence devoted to studying the design and analysis of machine learning algorithms.
Maurice Stevenson Bartlett FRS was an English statistician who made particular contributions to the analysis of data with spatial and temporal patterns. He is also known for his work in the theory of statistical inference and in multivariate analysis.
Trygve Magnus Haavelmo, born in Skedsmo, Norway, was an economist whose research interests centered on econometrics. He received the Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences in 1989.
Calyampudi Radhakrishna Rao,, commonly known as C. R. Rao, is an Indian-American mathematician and statistician. He is currently professor emeritus at Pennsylvania State University and Research Professor at the University at Buffalo. Rao has been honoured by numerous colloquia, honorary degrees, and festschrifts and was awarded the US National Medal of Science in 2002. The American Statistical Association has described him as "a living legend whose work has influenced not just statistics, but has had far reaching implications for fields as varied as economics, genetics, anthropology, geology, national planning, demography, biometry, and medicine." The Times of India listed Rao as one of the top 10 Indian scientists of all time. In 2023, Rao was awarded the International Prize in Statistics, an award often touted as the "statistics’ equivalent of the Nobel Prize". Rao is also a Senior Policy and Statistics advisor for the Indian Heart Association non-profit focused on raising South Asian cardiovascular disease awareness.
Model selection is the task of selecting a model from among various candidates on the basis of performance criterion to choose the best one. In the context of learning, this may be the selection of a statistical model from a set of candidate models, given data. In the simplest cases, a pre-existing set of data is considered. However, the task can also involve the design of experiments such that the data collected is well-suited to the problem of model selection. Given candidate models of similar predictive or explanatory power, the simplest model is most likely to be the best choice.
Fiducial inference is one of a number of different types of statistical inference. These are rules, intended for general application, by which conclusions can be drawn from samples of data. In modern statistical practice, attempts to work with fiducial inference have fallen out of fashion in favour of frequentist inference, Bayesian inference and decision theory. However, fiducial inference is important in the history of statistics since its development led to the parallel development of concepts and tools in theoretical statistics that are widely used. Some current research in statistical methodology is either explicitly linked to fiducial inference or is closely connected to it.
Bradley Efron is an American statistician. Efron has been president of the American Statistical Association (2004) and of the Institute of Mathematical Statistics (1987–1988). He is a past editor of the Journal of the American Statistical Association, and he is the founding editor of the Annals of Applied Statistics. Efron is also the recipient of many awards.
Ştefan S. Ralescu is a statistician who has made contributions to the theory of statistical inference, mainly through asymptotic theory. He is a professor of mathematics and statistics at Queens College of the City University of New York in New York City. He studied first at the University of Bucharest obtaining an MA in mathematics (1976). He came to Indiana University in 1977, completing his PhD in 1981 under the direction of Madan Lal Puri. Before moving to New York, Ralescu was an assistant professor in the Division of Applied Mathematics at Brown University (1981–1984).
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.
Pandurang Vasudeo Sukhatme (1911–1997) was an Indian statistician. He is known for his pioneering work of applying random sampling methods in agricultural statistics and in biometry, in the 1940s. He was also influential in the establishment of the Indian Agricultural Statistics Research Institute. As a part of his work at the Food and Agriculture Organization in Rome, he developed statistical models for assessing the dimensions of hunger and future food supplies for the world. He also developed methods for measuring the size and nature of the protein gap.
Causal inference is the process of determining the independent, actual effect of a particular phenomenon that is a component of a larger system. The main difference between causal inference and inference of association is that causal inference analyzes the response of an effect variable when a cause of the effect variable is changed. The science of why things occur is called etiology, and can be described using the language of scientific causal notation. Causal inference is said to provide the evidence of causality theorized by causal reasoning.
Stan is a probabilistic programming language for statistical inference written in C++. The Stan language is used to specify a (Bayesian) statistical model with an imperative program calculating the log probability density function.
Raquel Prado is a Venezuelan Bayesian statistician. She is a professor of statistics in the Jack Baskin School of Engineering of the University of California, Santa Cruz, and has been elected president of the International Society for Bayesian Analysis for the 2019 term.
