In a situation when data has to be analysed, like for instance, the marks achieved by a certain number of students for a certain piece of course work, it is possible to put to use descriptive as well as inferential statistics in the analysis of the marks that is to be done. Mostly, in all the researches that are conducted on the groups of people, both descriptive as well as inferential statistics are put to use so as the results can be analysed and conclusions can be drawn. Now, we need to understand what is the real difference between descriptive and inferential statistics?
Descriptive Statistics
It is the term that is given to that type of data analysis which helps to describe, show or help to describe and summarize the data in such a way that meaning is added to it. However, the descriptive statistics do not offer the scope for deriving conclusions beyond the data analysis and help in concluding the acceptance or rejection of the hypotheses. They are only the simpler ways to describe the data. Descriptive statistics play a very important role because if the data is represented otherwise it would be difficult to understand the representation of the data, More, so if there was a lot of data. Generally, there are two types of statistics that are used for describing the data.
1. Measures of Central Tendency: it helps to measure the central position of a frequency distribution for a group of data.
2. Measures of Spread: it helps to measure how spreads out the scores of the data ar
Inferential Statistics
While Descriptive statistics give information about an immediate group of data inferential statistics are those techniques that help us to make use of these samples so as to make generalisations regarding the population from which the samples have been extracted. It is necessary that the sample represents the population accurately. The method for achieving the same is called sampling. There is a fact about sampling that causes the occurrence of Inferential Statistics and that is the occurrence of sampling error and the sample does not represent the population perfectly. The methods of inferential statistics are
1. Estimation of parameters
2. Testing of statistical Hypotheses
