ACMS – Spring 2011 Elements of Statistics With a title like that, it seems appropriate that the course should start with an explanation of what STATISTICS is. Quoting from the textbook, p. 4, we get: Statistics is the science of data. This involves collecting, classifying, summarizing, organizing, analyzing and interpreting numerical information. All that comes to mind after that definition is a bunch of questions: 1.Numerical information about what? 2.Who does (and how) the collecting? 3.What do all those verbs mean? (classifying, summarizing, organizing, analyzing and interpreting) We better start at the beginning:

The 4 components