INTRODUCTION/STATISTICS

Statistics 101: A No BS Introduction for Dummies

The only blog you need to understand statistics from scratch with real-life examples

Written by Vaibhav Desai

An ideal beginning would have been “Statistics is a science ….”. But, since this is a no BS introduction we have avoided lame definitions and jargon. To share the easiest introduction let us begin with something that all of us can relate to, ‘Sports’.

Pick a sport of your choice and a team in that sport you closely follow. Say, your team is competing in a tournament and is having a rough patch having lost two of the last three games that they have played which makes you as a fan anxious 😨. But, when you look at the overall performance in the tournament so far, you observe that they have won nine out of the twelve games played in the tournament so far.

Now, let’s take a step back and build some intuition around this. When we look at the performance based on the past two games, the success rate of the team comes out to be ~33%, but when we look at the overall performance in the tournament so far, the success rate comes out to be 75%. This is one of the primary applications of statistics, it helps us look at the bigger picture by ‘summarizing’ events into a…