1 Why you should care about statistics
This chapter covers
- Good reasons to learn statistics
- How statistics helps software engineers, data scientists, and AI developers
- Recognizing the difficulties, misaligned incentives, and ethical concerns of statistics
Statistics describes and infers truths from data, which takes the form of analyzing a sample representing a larger population or domain. It is an area of mathematics that collects, analyzes, interprets, and quantifies numerical data1. While statistics is a broad discipline that affects any role touching data, this book will cover techniques that should benefit anyone who wants to tease out truth and insights from data.
We can count on data never going away and the techniques we use to get insight from it. Therefore, knowledge in statistics will be timeless and yield opportunities for any role that touches data. Statistical proficiency and literacy have the following benefits: