📂Data Science

Parameter and Statistic in Basic Statistics

Definition ¹

A Parameter is a numerical descriptive measure associated with a population, while something computed from a sample is referred to as a Statistic.

Explanation

Although there can be various definitions of statistics, fundamentally, it is considered a field of study which primarily focuses on ‘what is a Parameter’ especially in inferential statistics, a field slightly more abstract from general understanding and favored by majors, including Mathematical Statistics. From this perspective, statistics can be defined as a discipline that studies how to figure out the Parameters of a population through data.

Interestingly, adding an s to Statistic turns it into Statistics, essentially becoming the subject of study itself. This signifies that statistics is fundamentally the study of statistics, particularly referred to as Estimators when concerning Parameters. For instance, the statistic of adding up all samples and dividing by their count, known as the Sample Mean $\overline{x}$, is an estimator for finding out the population mean $\mu$.

See Also

Statistics and Estimators in Mathematical Statistics

Hyperparameter