Introduction to statistics

Abstract

Statistical tools and techniques play a major role in many areas of science like biology, economics, physics etc. In particular, a systematic development in statistical methodology for biological problems started long back and constituted a new area of biostatistics. Compared to biology, the rate of progress in the development of statistical techniques for physical science is very slow. The reason may be due to lack of interaction between Physicists and Statisticians. In areas like Astronomy and Astrophysics the application of sophisticated statistical analysis is a comparatively recent phenomenon. Astronomy is the science to study the different features of planets, stars, galaxies and the universe as a whole. Astrophysicists try to model observed astronomical properties by using laws governing physical process. The problem is to make inference for the underlying properties on the basis of observations related to a few external characteristics. During the past two decades the inter-disciplinary field of astrostatistics has newly emerged in order to study important astrophysical issues through appropriate statistical analysis. With the advancement of technology, at present several data archives have been prepared which contain tera bytes of astronomical data. Statistical analysis of these high dimensional large data sets is a challenging problem and a good solution can be obtained only through interaction among Astronomers, Statisticians and Computer Scientists.