statistics
the science of data
data analysis
organizing, displaying, summarizing, and asking questions about data
individuals
objects described by a set of data
- may be people, animals, or things
variable
any characteristic of an individual, can take different values for different individuals
- ex: gender, grade, age, GPA
categorical variable
places an individual into one of several groups or categories
- ex: gender, marital status, could be zip code even though it's a number (you wouldn't find the average of several zip codes)
quantitative variable
takes numerical values for which it makes sense to find an average
- ex: age, income, height, travel time
distribution
tells us what values the variable takes and how often
inference
drawing conclusions that go beyond the data we have