Chapter 8

Introduction to Statistics

The first seven chapters of this book taught us to analyze problems and systems involving uncertainty, to find probabilities, expectations, and other characteristics for a variety of situations, and to produce forecasts that may lead to important decisions.

What was given to us in all these problems? Ultimately, we needed to know the distribution and its parameters, in order to compute probabilities or at least to estimate them by means of Monte Carlo. Often the distribution may not be given, and we learned how to fit the suitable model, say, Binomial, Exponential, or Poisson, given the type of variables we deal with. In any case, parameters of the fitted distribution had to be reported to us explicitly, or ...

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