1 Introduction

1.1 Learning Objectives

We focus on classical statistics (also referred to as frequentist statistics), which is used extensively in the life sciences. This section of the Data Science Immersive course is broken down into three main topic areas:

• Data Collection
• Descriptive Statistics
• Inferential Statistics

At the end of this section you should understand the purpose and uses of classical statistics as an integral part of the scientific method. This means understanding how statistics informs our decisions when designing experiments, collecting and describing samples and inferring something about the population from which the sample was taken. To aid in you understanding of inference we’ll cover estimation and confidence intervals before progressing onto hypothesis testing. Commonly used statistical tests and linear regression will be covered in this context.