What is Statistics (and why is it important in machine learning)?

Last Updated on August 8, 2019

Statistics is a collection of tools that you can use to get answers to important questions about data.

You can use descriptive statistical methods to transform raw observations into information that you can understand and share. You can use inferential statistical methods to reason from small samples of data to whole domains.

In this post, you will discover clearly why statistics is important in general and for machine learning and generally the types of methods that are available.

After reading this post, you will know:

• Statistics is generally considered a prerequisite to the field of applied machine learning.
• We need statistics to help transform observations into information and to answer questions about samples of observations.
• Statistics is a collection of tools developed over hundreds of years for summarizing data and quantifying properties of a domain given a sample of observations.

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