Inferential Statistics

Inferential statistics (or deductive statistics) is used to draw conclusions about a data set and its underlying information. Usually this means drawing inferences about a population by using one or more samples of this population. Two important fields of inferential statistics are hypothesis testing and parameter or model estimation.

Inferential statistics uses probability theory to develop suitable estimation methods for drawing conclusion from samples about the corresponding populations. This usually results in a more or less accurate estimation, whose precision is determined by confidence intervals.