Question

For this discussion, you will compare these two categories of statistics, and explain which you feel is the most important to the biological sciences. Develop a main response in which you address the following:

Briefly summarize the main functions of descriptive and inferential statistics.

Identify which you feel is the most useful in the biological sciences.

Explain your position, providing supporting evidence from the textbook, other scholarly sources, and/or examples where possible.

Answer 1

• Descriptive statistics: It is used when you have to describe something interesting about the data by stating their mean, min, max, variance or median etc. For example, say you have a data of the scores of a soccer player and through this data you describe something interesting that the player has much lesser average goals in away games than home games. Therefore, you have used the 'mean' function to describe something about the data. This is descriptive statistics.
• Inferential statistics: This is a function which is used to draw an inference from a sample which is valid for the entire population. For example, when you have a sample of a population and you draw a conclusion from it. You use a z-statistic to reject the null hypothesis or not and ultimately say that it is valid for entire population or not. Hence, z, t, F-ratio, chi-square etc. statistics are classic inferential statistics.

I feel that inferential statistics are more useful in biological sciences because unlike descriptive statistics, inferential statistics are used to draw conclusions about the population if the sample is large and is a good representation of the entire population. Hence, these conclusions can be used in the biological sciences. For example, let's say there is a medicine that claims to improve the conditions of diabetic patients & you want to verify the same claim. You will take a sample from the population and form two groups, the one who takes that medicine for a few weeks and the other group which doesn't. You will then measure the difference between the both groups and claim that in general, for the entire public, this medicine is effective to improve the conditions for diabetic conditions. Now, if you just compared both the groups through data and didn't say anything about the population will be descriptive statistics. But now that you have concluded about the entire population that this medicine is effective is inferential statistics.