Introduction to Statistics and Biostatistics

Knowingly or unknowingly, people use “statistics.” In ancient days, people generally used the term statistics to understand the political state. German scholar Gottfried Achenwall most probably used the word “statistics.” In any case, the word statistics is being used knowingly or unknowingly since time immemorial. The word statistics is being used in two different forms: (a) in singular sense, it is the body of science, which deals with principles, techniques, collections, scrutiny, analysis, and drawing inference on a subject of interest, and (b) in plural sense, it refers to data, i.e., presentations of facts and figures or information. Year-wise food grain production figures of different provinces of the United States of America may constitute a data set – food grain production statistics – whereas the problem of identifying, analyzing, and establishing the differences between two herds of cows to facilitate breeding improvement program may be the subject matter of the subject statistics. Given a set of data, one can explain it to some extent, but beyond a certain level, it becomes difficult to unearth the hidden information from the data. Data require analysis, theoretical, and computational treatment to speak for itself. Thus, the “subject statistics” is being used to “data statistics” to unearth the so long-hidden information in a set of data for the benefit of humanity.