The salt-and-pepper of inferential statistics is the estimation and testing hypotheses. In the last chapter, we talked about estimation and making certain inferences about the world. In this chapter, we will be talking about how to test the hypotheses on how the world works and evaluate the hypotheses using only sample data.
In the previous chapter, I promised that this would be a very practical chapter and I'm a man of my word; this chapter goes over a broad range of the most popular methods in modern data analysis at a relatively high level. Even so, this chapter might have a little more detail than the lazy and impatient would want. At the same time, it will have way too little detail than what the extremely curious and mathematically inclined want. In fact, some statisticians would have a heart attack at the degree to which I skip over the math involved with these subjects—but I won't tell if you don't!
Nevertheless, certain complicated concepts and math are...