STATISTICS FOR ECONOMISTS

At the end of Statistics for Economists, students should be able to

• distinguish between a population and a sample

• understand the concept of a sampling distribution

• apply the sampling distribution of the single sample mean and a single proportion

• understand where the t distribution should be used

• apply the sampling distribution of the difference between two sample means

1. Statistics for Economists based on Inferential Statistics: generalizing from samples to populations using probabilities performing hypothesis testing, determining relationships between variables, and making predictions. 

2. Inferential statistics is a process of describing the population based on the sample results (i.e: it consists of techniques for reaching conclusions about a population based upon information contained in a sample). 

3. We use inferential statistics to try to infer from the sample data what the population might think (i.e. to make inferences from our data to more general conditions).

4. Inferential statistics uses patterns in the sample data to draw inferences about the population represented, accounting for randomness. These inferences may take the form of: answering yes/no questions about the data (hypothesis testing), estimating numerical characteristics of the data (estimation), describing associations within the data (correlation), modeling relationships within the data (regression), extrapolation, interpolation, or other modeling techniques like ANOVA, time series, and data mining.