Statistics refers to a mathematical science that deals with the categorization, collection, examination, interpretation, as well as presentation of numerical data for drawing accurate conclusion (Langford, 2009). There are three types of statistics namely inferential, predictive, and descriptive that together can be termed applied statistics (Langford, 2009). Besides, four different levels of measurement exist including ordinal, nominal, interval, and ratio (Langford, 2009).
Statistics plays a key role in business decision-making and only those companies, which focus in market statistical analysis, can survive in the current competitive world market. Businesses at times face unpredictable outcomes, which may adversely affect their output and operations. Statistical data analysis can be used to foresee these uncertainties and help in managerial decision making in order to prevent steering production, expenditure, and customer services into undesired avenues (Langford, 2009).
In course plotting, statistics may be used to monitor long-term prediction for strategic planning. In the light of this, statistical models can provide a baseline forecast for the business revenues and costs in the future, thus enabling the managerial team to adjust their decisions concerning the new product outlines, market trend, and competitor activities.
Statistics has been used in real life situations to address various life problems. Police officers have used statistics to discover intersections that have the leading accidents rate giving them the capacity to study those intersections and decrease the accident rate. In sports, statistics is useful in checking for potential athletes. Sport teams can also use statistics to organize against upcoming opponents. In the school set up, statistics has been used to analyze school’s performance, which offers a critical piece of information for parents and teachers in making proper decision on how to improve performance at school level or student's level.
References
Langford, W. J. (2009). Statistical Methods. Nature, 2(1), 3-19. doi:10.1038/1841523a0
