Welcome to Degrees of Freedom

On this website, I’ll explain the statistical concepts I think everyone should understand.

Usually, when people say statistics, they mean numbers.

• 60% of the world's population owns a smartphone.
• 83% of Americans say they could successfully grow a vegetable garden with the skills they currently have.

Those are statistics: numerical descriptions of data.

But statistics is also a discipline. In particular, statistics is the science of learning from data.

Statistics can be divided into two categories: descriptive and inferential

Descriptive statistics summarize the data we have.

Inferential statistics use the data we have to quantify uncertainty and draw inferences beyond the current data.

There are two approaches to inferential statistics: frequentist and Bayesian

Frequentists make inferences by considering the long-run behavior of data—what would happen if we were to do the same study over and over and over again.

Bayesians start with what we already know and update our beliefs using the current data.

That being said, most statisticians borrow tools from both philosophies, so the distinction isn’t always clear-cut. I will discuss both, because I love all statistics equally.