I often find people either terrified or bored by statistics. In some friend circles it is even a shorthand for ‘boring’. I attribute this misjudgment to people not being shown the beauty and everyday usefulness of statistics. As a result of which they akin stats to something used by boring professors and crazy scientists. I want to break notion by ‘breaking-down’ statistics into it’s constituent parts. Thereby showing to everyone that it’s really just common sense on steroids. That’s all.

So without much ado, in this series of blog post, over the next couple of weeks, I shall (try to) explain with simplicity and brevity, what statistics means, does and how it is used in everyday life. Let’s do the numbers, shall we?!

Statistics

Statistics is the the art of learning from data. In lay terms, it involves, summarizing, influencing, predicting.

Types of Statistics

Descriptive Statistics Describing and summarizing the data to examine and explore information for its own sake. Descriptive statistics is what they mean when people say, “They want to learn what the numbers say” This could be considered the purest form of statistics in that we are simply reporting what we see. No inferences, no external ideas, whatsoever. We take what we get and say things about it as they appear.

Inferential Statistics Drawing conclusions from data. In it we examine and explore a sample extracted from a population with the purpose of making predictions and drawing conclusions upon the population. The population being, the entire set of data (eg: all 100 employees in a company) and the sample people a subset of it (10 employees selected at random for an experiment)

One interesting and major part of Inferential statistics is Probability Theory. We will be looking at it in greater detail later on but for now understand this– We live in a VUCA world, whenever there is a possibility of something happening or not happening, there is probability involved and hence Inferential Statistics comes to the rescue

What is the center of this thing?

Aka, Measures of Central Tendency. You can think of these as a set of scores to help figure out what is the most common thing among a set of things. A good example is– Say you have a bucket that contains a mix of green and red apples. You can use (a) measures of central tendency to figure out which type is more common– green or red.

Types of Measures of Central Tendency

As shared earlier, these scores measure the most typical value in or center of the data set. Mean The mean of a data set is the sum of observations divided by number of observations. This works well when you have a count of things and a subcategory for each type. For example, As HR, you conducted a IQ test in your organization and want to find out whats the basic average IQ of a department. This is super easy with Mean. You simply sum up all the scores, then divide that number by the total number of employees in that department.

Median The median of a data set splits the data set into a bottom 50% and a top 50%. In other words, it’s the “Middle most” value of your dataset. Think of a ruler of 6 centimeter length. The median of this ruler is at 3 centimeter. Using How to: Here’s how you can get your median: Step 1: Arrange the data in ascending order Step 2A: If the total number of items (n) is an odd number then the median is n/2 Step 2B: If the total number of items (n) is an even number then the median is the average of n/2 and n/2+1

Mode The mode is the most frequently occurring value in the data set. In our apple basket example, this is the ideal measure of central tendency one could use. Literally take an apple out of the basket and place it either in the red pile or the green pile. After all the apples in the bucket have been exhausted, you will find either of the 3 cases to be true:

  • Red pile is greater than the green pile
    • In this case, the Red apple has the mode
  • Green pile is greater than the red pile
    • In this case, the Green apple has the mode
  • Both piles are of equal size
    • In this case, there does not exist a mode

Another example: Take this list of emojis: [🍔🍎🍇🍈🍏🌕🌈🔥💧] here we see, each emoji appears only once.

Take this new list of emojis: [🍔🍎💧🍇🍏💧🌈💧💧🔥💧] Here we can clearly see, The 💧 emoji (water droplet) appears a total of 5 times. Therefore, the Mode is 5 and it belongs to the 💧 meme.