| Bayesian hypothesis | An array of surmised values of a parameter to be severally explored in the light of a current set of data, with logical symmetry being preserved among all. The merits of each hypothesis entertained are based on quantity, the prior probability. The probability of the data conditional on the hypothesis is computed as the conditional probability for each; the product of the two for each hypothesis is the joint probability, and the ratio of each joint probability to the sum of all the joint probabilities is the posterior probability for that hypothesis. Unlike the Neyman-Pearson test of hypotheses, the answer is a statement about the hypothesis, not about the sample conditional on the hypothesis. No hypothesis is preferred or prevails by default. The procedure may be applied recursively any number of times, as the data becomes available. (05 Mar 2000) |
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| vital statistics | Used for general articles concerning statistics of births, deaths, marriages, etc. (12 Dec 1998) |
| national centre for health statistics | A centre in the public health service which is primarily concerned with the collection, analysis, and dissemination of health statistics on vital events and health activities to reflect the health status of people, health needs, and health resources. (12 Dec 1998) |
| statistics | The science and art of collecting, summarizing, and analyzing data that are subject to random variation. The term is also applied to the data themselves and to the summarization of the data. (12 Dec 1998) |
| statistics, nonparametric | A class of statistical methods applicable to a large set of probability distributions used to test for correlation, location, independence, etc. In most nonparametric statistical tests, the original scores or observations are replaced by another variable containing less information. An important class of nonparametric tests employs the ordinal properties of the data. Another class of tests uses information about whether an observation is above or below some fixed value such as the median, and a third class is based on the frequency of the occurrence of runs in the data. (12 Dec 1998) |
| descriptive statistics | Numerical values such as mean, median, and mode which describe the chief features of a group of scores, without regard to a larger population. (05 Mar 2000) |
| inferential statistics | Statistics from which an inference is made about the nature of a population; the purpose is to generalise about the population, based upon data from the sample selected from the population. (05 Mar 2000) |