Overview
Statistical Inference refers to the process of inferring the properties of a data generating process based on a set of samples of that process. The properties are typically estimates of the moments of the distribution, but can be other statistics as well.
Statistical inference is used in hypothesis testing, which gives confidence intervals for variables of interest, often to determine if it is likely that a variable is non zero.
Surveys and Sampling
One of the common uses of statistical inference occurs where the data generating process to be estimated is a population of fixed individuals. As an example, a poll may attempt to predict the results of an outcome by sampling a small group from the total population and trying to estimate the voting outcomes of the whole group.
Topics
- Estimation - Estimation is the process of determining a point estimate of a distribution parameter.
- Maximum Likelihood method is a method that assumes that some distribution with unknown parameters has generated a dataset, and then looks for the parameter values which would maximize the likelihood that the dataset would be generated from those parameters.
- Hypothesis Testing allows you to compute the probability of a given measurement or event, given a pre-specified model.
- Meta Analysis
- Resampling