The Nature of Statistics

The academic discipline of Statistics is a branch of mathematics that develops and uses techniques for answering questions that arise in all areas of human endeavor. Medical researchers use them to test the safety and effectiveness of new drugs or to appraise the effects of lifestyle changes; nutritionists use them to investigate health claims associated with foods or dietary supplements; business executives use them to assess the results of marketing campaigns or the effect of new methods of production on product quality. Economists use them to forecast the business cycle; politicians to predict the outcome of future elections. Spies use them decipher coded messages. The list goes on. No wonder that Statistics has been called a universal guide to the unknown.
Consider your own health, one among millions of topics that Statistics could address. We will do so at length in Book 24, the final volume of this series, but even now all of us are aware of meeting new health-related stories every day ̶ about prescription and over-the-counter drugs, medical devices and procedures, the lifestyle we should adopt, foods we should favor, and dietary supplements that would surely add years to our lives. Rightly, we dismiss many of these stories as pure snake oil. Mayonnaise prevents Alzheimer’s ? Chelation therapy blasts arterial plaque ? Food coloring lowers bad cholesterol? Cinnamon clobbers diabetes? Grapefruit erases breast cancer? Watermelon slashes prostate cancer? Come on! But what about more serious-sounding claims? True enough, reports about ACE inhibitors and beta blockers, Advil and Motrin, 64-slice CT scans and PSA tests, drug-coated stents and the DASH diet appear to be far removed from snake oil, but false claims about any of these may well occur, which makes them snake oil no less than absurd and fantastic claims about mayonnaise and Alzheimer’s.
Luckily, a knowledge of Statistics offers a remedy. It helps us separate bogus claims from the real thing. It helps us adopt a special way of statistical thinking that is routinely employed by the best of those who undertake the scientific studies that alone can generate medical knowledge we can trust.
The field, however, is so vast that no single book can reasonably cover all of it. Nor can it anticipate which topics will be of interest to any given person. This author, therefore, has divided the field into 24 sections that are made available as separate books from which readers can select the subset that is most useful to them.
After reading Book 1, you will 1. come to know statistics as a field of study that develops and utilizes techniques for the careful collection, effective presentation, and proper analysis of numerical information, 2. get a preview of the kinds of problems you will learn to solve and, in the process, come to see why statistics is said to facilitate wise decision-making in the face of uncertainty, 3. meet a number of basic statistical concepts, including statistical populations, samples, variables, data, and more, and 4. learn to distinguish among different types of data (such as nominal, ordinal, interval, and ratio data) and, thus, develop an awareness of different data qualities. (The latter is a crucial prerequisite for learning that certain arithmetic operations, such as adding, subtracting, multiplying, and even dividing nominal and ordinal data, are guaranteed to produce pure nonsense. Yet a computer will dutifully perform such operations whenever you ask!)
Book 1 concludes with numerous tests (70 Practice Problems, almost 100 True-False and Multiple-Choice questions, and a Recognition Exercise involving 28 key terms), along with solutions and answers for all of these. This first volume of the series also includes an Appendix featuring Excel Data Files and Add-in Programs that can greatly facilitate work with Microsoft Excel, the computer program utilized throughout the succeeding volumes of the series.