The impact of statistics in modern society
Often overlooked as a field of study, statistics has grown by a lot in modern computing, business and technology. What was once considered as nothing more than a sector of mathematics, has now become very impactful on modern society on a daily basis. The most important reason for this is that the true roots of data, data analysis and many other related fields are all branched from statistics. Statistics and statistical knowledge helps to implement proper techniques, discover the correct analysis fit and produce the desired results effectively. Statistical concepts are also vastly present in data science, data mining, artificial intelligence, computer vision and other complicated fields in computer science and information technology. But it is also extremely important in drawing conclusions in business.
The real importance of statistics is in how it uses real life numerical values to evidently produce results and conclusions. Statistics is applied in our everyday lives. Recommendations and advises that doctors and physicians give their patients are also based on statistics. They would also advise their patients to not do anything that has proven to be harmful among other patients. Aspects like these make statistics and what is essentially data, an extremely important part of our lives. The goal of statistics is to create results that can be relied on, while also considering outliers. And to draw conclusions that are reasonable and comprehensible.
Below will be listed some fields of study that have been made possible due to statistical knowledge or statistical concepts:
- Business Analysis: Any analyst in a field like business must have the statistical concepts necessary to draw various conclusions. To make decisions that give the most profitable outcomes and the most effective impacts on the market, it is very necessary to draw conclusions from past sales and customer data. So for a business analyst, it is extremely necessary to know a significant amount of statistics.
- Banking: One of the most statistic centric professional fields is perhaps in Banking. Managing the data of hundreds of clients would not be possible without the implementation of statistical methods. A simple example would be: Banks manage an estimation of the number of people who would make a deposit on any particular day, based on the same statistic of the previous few days. This helps them prepare their operations accordingly.
- Data Mining: One of the more complicated fields, data mining would be non-existent without data and hence statistics. Data mining is, in short, extracting useful information from large data sets with involvement of methods from machine learning, statistics and database systems. Data mining makes it extremely easier for companies that operate with insurmountable amounts of data, and this is only possible through the very complicated methods inherited from statistics.
- Database Manager: This is given in the name itself. To deal with errors and complicacies regarding data in databases, it is extremely crucial for database managers to have a strong concept of statistics. With the help of statistics, database managers can reduce data redundancy, anomalies and errors in the database architecture.
Statistics is a field of study, but it is also more than that. Finding patterns from samples, finding patterns in our lives is what makes it possible to find ways to make it easier. Collecting data and drawing conclusions out of them is what makes data so useful, it’s what makes statistics so useful. Without the help of statistics, technology and business would both be very much backdated compared to where we are today. And for a general individual in any professional field, since data is becoming more and more important, so is the importance of statistics.
