A Leisurely Look at Statistical Inference

Abstract

Statistical inference is the basic toolkit used throughout the whole book. This chapter is intended to offer a short, rather informal introduction to this topic and to compare its two principled paradigms: the frequentist and the Bayesian approach. Mathematical rigour is abandoned in favour of a verbal, more illustrative exposition of this subject, and throughout this chapter the focus will be on concepts rather than details, omitting all proofs and regularity conditions. The main target audience is students and researchers in biology and computer science, who aim to obtain a basic understanding of statistical inference without having to digest rigorous mathematical theory.