Applied statistics/Related Articles

Glossary

• Confidence interval [r]: the range of a random variable, such as the mean of a sample, that — with a specified probability — contains the true value for the population. ^[e]
• Confidence level [r]: the probability that the true value of a random variable lies within the estimated (or predicted) confidence interval. ^[e]
• Deterministic [r]: the predictable effect of known causes (used in contrast to stochastic). ^[e]
• Mean [r]: e.g. "arithmetic mean", being the sum of n observations divided by n, or "geometric mean", being the nth root of the product of n observations. ^[e]
• Median (statistics) [r]: The value of a numerical or linearly ordered sample for which one half of the observations lie above and one half lie below that value. ^[e]
• Mode (statistics) [r]: the most frequently ocurring value. ^[e]
• Normal distribution [r]: a symmetrical bell-shaped probability distribution representing the frequency of random variations of a quantity from its mean. ^[e]
• Population (statistics) [r]: the totality of the people or things that constitute the category that is the subject of a statistical investigation, and from which a sample is drawn. ^[e]
• Sample (statistics) [r]: An instance of a random variable used to estimate one or several of its parameters. ^[e]
• Standard deviation [r]: A statistical measure for the fluctuation of a random variable about its mean value (the square root of the variance). ^[e]
• Standard error [r]: the standard deviation of the variation of a statistic that would occur if the same sampling method were applied repeatedly: for example, the standard error of the mean is measured as the standard deviation of the observed (sample) mean as measured in independent samples of a given size. ^[e]
• Stochastic [r]: of a random nature (sometimes contrasted with deterministic). ^[e]
• Variance [r]: A statistical measure of the variability of a random quantity (defined as the mean squared deviation from the mean value). ^[e]