Statistics, a quick intro

karthik · updated · flag

Let’s start with the basics. Let’s say you have a huge sample/dataset at your hand. Statistics is how you communicate that data. It’s how you express what the data represents. In other words, you summarise or visualise the data so it’s easy to communicate with your peers. This business of collecting, sorting, analysing, visualising, and drawing actionable intelligence from the data is called statistics. And there are two types of it.

  • Descriptive statistics - The ‘visualizing data’ part.
  • Inferential statistics - The ‘drawing intelligence from the visualized data’ part.

In descriptive statistics, you can describe/summarise a data based on two things.

  • Measure of central tendency
  • Measure of dispersion or spread

In the upcoming lessons, you’ll learn the basic concepts from each of these domains.