One can define statistics in various ways. My favorite definition is bipartite:
Statistics is both the science of uncertainty and the technology of extracting information from data.
This definition captures the two aspects of the discipline: that it is about understanding (and indeed manipulating) chance, and also about collecting and analyzing data to enable us to understand the world around us. More specifically, of course, statistics can have different aims, including prediction and forecasting, classification, estimation, description, summarization, decision-making, and others.
Statistics has several roots, which merged to form the modern discipline. These include (1) the theory of probability, initially formalized around the middle of the seventeenth century in attempts to understand games of chance, and then put on a sound mathematical footing with Kolmogorov’s axioms around 1930; (2) surveys of people for governmental administrative and economic purposes, as well as work aimed...
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References and Further Reading
Chambers JM (1993) Greater or lesser statistics: a choice for future research. Stat Comput 3:182–184
Hand DJ (2008) Statistics: a very short introduction. Oxford University Press, Oxford
Hand DJ (2009) Modern statistics: the myth and the magic (RSS Presidential Address). J R Stat Soc A 172:287–306
Cox DR (2006) Principles of statistical inference. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge
Barnett V (1999) Comparative statistical inference, 3rd edn. Wiley, Chichester
Wasserman L (2004) All of statistics: a concise course in statistical inference. Springer, New York
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Hand, D. (2011). Statistics: An Overview. In: Lovric, M. (eds) International Encyclopedia of Statistical Science. Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-642-04898-2_556
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