Question

Discuss the importance of the Frequentist(Classical) method in Statistics.

Answer 1

In frequentist method the probabilities are obtained by repeated experiments occurring for a long time. Here the frequency of occurance decides the probability ( According to frequency approach Probability is the likelihood of a certain event occurring out of a total possible number of events.). To be more reliable on the calculation of the probability of a particular event we take a large number of repetitions for eg consider the coin tossing experiment having only two outcomes. To identify whether the coin is biased or unbiased the coin is tossed repeatedly many number of times to reach the conclusion.. This is known as frequency approach.

Frequency approach is mainly used to understand the probability of occurance of events. In most of the cases the probabilities of occurances are unknown. In such case an experiment is repeated sufficient number of times to identify the empirical distribution ( Probability distribution obtained from the sample collected). Larger the sample size, more accuracy we attain in the calculation of probabilities. Central Limit Theorem in probability is based on this approach. Frequency analysis gives idea on the descriptive measures like central tendancy , dispersion percentiles etc. Every sphere like medical, geology, agriculture, climatic conditions etc uses frequency approach to come to a conclusion.

For instance A production unit wants to know the customer demand for the new product. It will use the frequency analysis tools to understand the demographics like average age, average income, average monthly spending , and the variances of each variable of our interest from the data collected by the unit to decide upon its marketing, positioning, pricing and distribution stratagies.