Statistical inference is the process of deducing properties of an underlying distribution by analysis of data. Inferential statistical analysis infers properties about a population; this includes testing hypotheses and deriving estimates.
There are three types of inference:
There are mainly three approaches to attack these problems:
Frequentist: Inference is judged based upon performance in repeated sampling.
Bayesian: Inference must be subjective. A prior distribution is chosen for the parameter we seek, and we combine the density of the data prior to obtain a joint distribution. A further application of Bayes Theorem gives us a distribution of the parameter, given the data. To perform computations...