Chapter 1 Introduction

We are constantly bombarded with statistics on a daily basis (whether we like it or not). This chapter starts with some motivating examples to illustrate the heavy use of statistics in our daily lives, and to introduce some important terminology and equations used to calculate descriptive measures (e.g., mean, standard deviation, etc.). We will start throwing around some data and R code in the applications, but we will not formally get into these details until later. When initially reading this chapter, you should skip or skim over the coding details and focus more on the conclusions. You can always come back to this chapter and focus on replicating the code after we cover R in subsequent chapters.