What Is Statistics Math - Importance Of Introduction To Elementary Statistics - Statistical Analysis

In this introduction to elementary statistics video we discuss what is statistics, some important statistical terms and one way we all use statistics very often in our lives.

Transcript/notes
What is statistics? Well, it is the science of collecting, organizing, summarizing and interpreting data. For instance, according to the U.S. Department of Health and human services website, less than 5% of adults participate in 30 minutes of physical activity each day, children spend more than 7 and a half hours a day in front of a screen, for 2 to 18 year olds, 40% of their total daily calories come from added sugars and solid fats. All of these numbers come from data and statistical analysis of this data.

And what statistics actually does is gives us, people, a way to make an informed decisions. For example, if you have ever bought something on Amazon, you probably look at the star ratings. If you find 2 similar versions of a product you want, say a camera lens, you look at the price of each, then how many overall stars it has, then maybe the distribution of the ratings, and how many total ratings it has, and maybe read a few of the highest and lowest reviews about the lens.

Then you are going to look at the sellers of the lens and check their ratings, and then you check out the delivery time till you have the product in your hands. In this scenario, you would have done a very quick and informal statistical analysis.

In learning about statistics, there are some important terms to have a basic understanding of.

An Individual also called an element is a person or object included in a study.

Variable is characteristic of the individual being measured or observed, which varies from individual to individual, so for instance, this could be occupation, income, age, education.

Observation is a value that is observed for a variable, which is also called a measurement. And a person can actually be an observation as can a certain product or even a set period in time.

Data is a piece of information, or pieces of information, or the values or measurements of a variable collected on individuals. For individual 1 these would be electrician, $62,000, 41 years old, and technical school. All of these would be observations for each of the different variables.

Data set is a collection data, so this table lists the individuals, the variables and each of the observations for each of the individuals. This little table here would be considered a data set.

Folks, this is the first video in a series of videos I will be posting about understanding statistics.

Timestamps
0:00 What is statistics?
0:30 What statistics does
1:09 Important statistical terms
1:19 What is a variable?
1:31 What is observation?
1:43 What is data?
1:54 What is a data set?