What Is Statistics? - Essay Sample

Introduction

Statistics refers to the branch of mathematics discipline which deals with the collection, analysis, interpretation, as well as the presentation of the data (Edition, T. E. 2014). There are various statistical concepts used in the analysis of different data. They include the meaning, mode, median, chi-square, standard deviation, range, p values, and even variance (Black, K. 2012). In the paper, the focus is made on the statistical mean, which is the average used in the derivation of the central tendency of the presented data. It can be determined by the addition of all the data in the given set in a population and then dividing them by the total count of the population set points (Corbett, J. E., & Melcher, D. 2014). The number which results after the addition and division is referred to as average/mean.

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The statistical mean is widely applied in different types of experiments. It is the type of calculation which eliminates errors while also helping in the derivation of more accurate results than the ones got from a single experiment (Xu, J. et al. 2016). It is used in the measurement of central tendency and the interpretation of data at hand. The numbers to the right of the mean are balanced to the ones on the left side. The residuals will then add up to zero only when the number is a statistical mean (Silverman, B. W. 2018). A single number, Y, is used in the estimation of the value of numbers, then the statistical mean helps in minimizing the sum of the squares (Yi - Y)2 of the residuals in the data. The advantage of the statistical mean is that it includes every item in the data. However, it can be disadvantageous in that it can be adversely affected by the extreme values in a set of data hence can be prone to bias.

An example of the calculation of the mean is denoted subsequently.

Data set (ages of 5 students) = (12, 14, 13, 15, 16) years.

Mean = sumtotal count

= 12+14+13+15+165= 705= 14 years

Conclusion

Thus, mean is a fundamental measure of central tendency. As expounded above, it helps in giving valuable information regarding the given data set. It can also provide a lot of insights into the nature of data and the experiments. Further, the statistical mean helps in the better interpretation of the statistical data aside from giving accurate values of experiments when average values are calculated after some similar experiments are carried out.

References

Black, K. (2012). Business statistics: For contemporary decision making. Hoboken, NJ: Wiley.

Corbett, J. E., & Melcher, D. (2014). Characterizing ensemble statistics: Mean size is represented across multiple frames of reference. Attention, Perception, & Psychophysics, 76(3), 746-758.Bottom of Form

Edition, T. E. (2014). Introductory statistics. Place of publication not identified: Lulu Com.

Silverman, B. W. (2018). Density estimation for statistics and data analysis. Routledge.

Xu, J., Ye, P., Li, Q., Du, H., Liu, Y., & Doermann, D. (2016). Blind image quality assessment based on high order statistics aggregation. IEEE Transactions on Image Processing, 25(9), 4444-4457.