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Is statistics too difficult?
Author(s) -
Hampel Frank,
Zurich Eth
Publication year - 1998
Publication title -
canadian journal of statistics
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
SCImago Journal Rank - 0.804
H-Index - 51
eISSN - 1708-945X
pISSN - 0319-5724
DOI - 10.2307/3315772
Subject(s) - probability and statistics , statistics , interpretation (philosophy) , mathematical statistics , subject matter , robustness (evolution) , mathematics , computer science , calculus (dental) , psychology , medicine , pedagogy , biochemistry , chemistry , dentistry , curriculum , gene , programming language
By means of several historical examples, it is shown that it does not appear to be easy to build bridges between rigorous mathematics and reasonable data‐analytic procedures for scientific measurements. After mentioning both some positive and some negative aspects of statistics, a formal framework for statistics is presented which contains the concept formation, derivation of results and interpretation of mathematical statistics as three essential steps. The difficulties especially of interpretation are shown for examples in several areas of statistics, such as asymptotics and robustness. Some problems of statistics in two subject‐matter sciences are discussed, and a summary and outlook are given.