13.7 Why Statistics?: A Closing Argument for Statistics

• Business, policy, education and medical decisions are made by humans based on data

• A central task when we observe some pattern in data is to infer whether the pattern will occur in some novel context

• Statistics, as we practice it in 203, allows us to characterize:

  • What we have seen
  • What we could have seen
  • Whether any guarantees exist about what we have seen
  • What we can infer about the population

• So that we can either describe, explain or predict behavior.