Lesson Between Probability and Statistics

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Probability. Statistics. These two subjects seem to be so similar that many people confuse the two frequently. They are not the same thing, nor are they exactly distinct. Actually, they are closely , inseperatably associated with each other.

Statistics is reality. It is the way that we get data from our real world through experiments, research, etc. and try to figure out the relationship between different things. Just like studying the association between body height and gender-it is 100% statistics. And in statistics, there are many times when we want to know or need to know how frequently something happens. To give a quantitative summary of our observation of how frequently A occurs, we made the concept frequency, which is [the number of times that A happens in the observation]/[the total times in our observation].

At the same time, our will to know how frequently something happens brought forth the idea of something's nature to happen frequently to a certain extent. The degree of how probable something occurs-probability. Based on this concept, we have established the study of probability. Rather, probability is sheer abstration, an absolute and perfect imagination, which qualifies itself to be called mathematics without doubt (but for statistics opinions still vary).

But it is this pair of concepts, frequency and probability, that links these two subjects. We cannot figure out exactly the probability of something, but with experiments, we can estimate it with the frequencies we calculate. Since these are all concepts to represent how frequently something happens, this comes naturally. And it is by this that the study of probability can be, via statistics,  applied to the real world and change it.

And after all, the idea is that these two subjects are interconnected primarily through the concepts of frequency and probability, which are the realistic and ideal sides to measeure the likelihood of things.