Analysing Statistical Data Using Probability - Chapter 7 - The Mathematics of Maybe: Introduction to Probability

Transcript

Analysing Statistical Data Using Probability In the real world, businesses and scientists use experimental probability all the time. We want to use probability to understand huge groups of people or things—this total group is called the Population. Imagine you want to know the favorite fruit of all 100,000 students in your city. You cannot possibly ask all of them; it would take too much time and money. Instead, you use Sampling. You randomly select a small, manageable group—say, 500 students. As long as you select these students randomly and fairly (so your sample is unbiased and represents all types of kids), you can use their answers to represent the entire city. If 100 out of your 500 sampled students say Mango is their favorite fruit, you calculate the experimental probability: 100/500=0.20=20% Because you trust your fair sample, you can now analyze the data and scale it up to the whole population. You can confidently predict that 20% of the entire city (20,000 kids out of 100,000) also love Mangoes. This is how businesses decide what products to make and how scientists make medical discoveries!