What is Statistics and Statistical thinking?

Statistics is what the Statistician perform. A widely accepted definition that the collection, organisation, analysing and dissemination of data is said to be statistics. However, statistics is even much more than the given definition. It has become a way of life. Let me describe Statistics in the light of Sir Francis Galton's famous experiment. In 1884, Sir Francis Galton did some simple science. He collected data on the heights of parents and their children and plotted his results on paper. He got something like the following figure 1. Diagram has been plotted with the help of R software from the "HistData" package using "Galton" data.

Each point on Galton’s graph represented a pair of numbers namely the average(mid) height of two parents and the height of their child. However, the results were not so wondering. He found that, on average, tall parents had tall children and short parents had short ones. But nature cannot follow a definite pattern and the relationship is not perfect. Some short parents have tall children. A few of the tall parents have short children. This being the case, Galton knew that he could not perfectly predict a child’s height just by knowing the parents’ heights. We can see from his results, however, he could do pretty well even more.

Now Galton had collected the heights of 952 parent­s-child pairs, which yielded him 1904(952 multiplied by 2) numbers or points. A great deal. He looked for a way to simplify the data and got the figure 2. Galton decided to draw a line and use the line for predicting a child’s height from that of his parents’. For each location on the horizontal axis—a parent’s height—there is a corresponding point on the line. The point’s projection onto the vertical axis represented Galton’s prediction for the child’s height. As expected, his prediction for a tall parent was a tall child and for a short parent, a short child. However, by using the same procedure, Galton also found something curious. His line predicted that tall parents would have children who, on average, were shorter than their parents. The line also predicted that short parents would have children who, on average, were taller than their parents. GREAT!! He described the non-predictive natural phenomenon statistically. Galton termed this phenomenon “regression toward mean". This is Nature's Will to Mediocrity.

What research had been done by Galton was all STATISTICS. From his research, it can be seen and learnt how statistical reasoning, logical approach as subsets of scientific thinking works. Statistical thinking is indeed abstract. Perhaps this very abstraction is what often makes formal statistical reasoning seem foreign to the layperson. Maybe it is our collective, traumatic experience with new and postmodern math. Whatever the reason, it is a fact that this particular language feels unnatural to most. It need not be. Since the emergence of Statistics is increasing rapidly, it is imperative for us to work and think statistically to every possibilities of our day-to-day life. So, while inculcating the statistical thinking, we should not isolate ourselves from these following points.

1. Ask question,

2. Design a frame of study,

3. Collect data and describe them,

4. Simplify the data,

5. Make inferences

6. Generalize the findings.

This blog is written after rigorous learning from various reliable sources. Hopefully, I am able to answer our question: What is Statistics and Statistical thinking.

Thanks for Reading :)

#statistics #statisticalthinking