At the heart of statistics lie the ideas of statistical inference. Methods of statistical inference enable the investigator to argue from the particular observations in a sample to the general case. In contrast to logical deductions from the general case to the specific case, a statistical inference can sometimes be incorrect. Nevertheless, one of the great intellectual advances of the twentieth century is the realization that strong scientific evidence can be developed on the basis of many, highly variable, observations.
The subject of statistical inference extends well beyond statistics’ historical purposes of describing and displaying data. It deals with collecting informative data, interpreting these data, and drawing conclusions. Statistical inference includes all processes of acquiring knowledge that involve fact finding through the collection and examination of data. These processes are as diverse as opinion polls, agricultural field trials, clinical trials of new medicines, and...
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References and Further Reading
Box GEP, Tiao GC (1973) Bayesian inference in statistical analysis. Addison-Wesley
Cox DR (2006) Principles of statistical inference, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge
Gelman A, Carlin JB, Stern HS, Rubin DB (2004) Bayesian data analysis, 2nd edn. Chapman and Hall/CRC Press, Boca Raton, FL
Johnson R, Freund J, Miller I (2011) Miller and Freund’s probability and statistics for engineers, 8th edn. Prentice-Hall, Upper Saddle River
Johnson R, Bhattacharyya GK (2010) Statistics – principles and methods, 6th edn. Wiley, Hoboken, NJ
Lehmann EL, Casella GC (2003) Theory of point estimation, 2nd edn. Springer, New York
Lehmann EL, Romano JP (2008) Testing of statistical hypotheses, 3rd edn. Springer, New York
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Johnson, R.A. (2011). Statistical Inference. In: Lovric, M. (eds) International Encyclopedia of Statistical Science. Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-642-04898-2_545
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-642-04898-2_545
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