Question

Describe the primary purpose of inferential statistics, and explain what you believe are the advantages and limitations of inferential statistics.

Answer 1

The main purpose of inferential statistics is to estimate a population characteristic based on a sample.

We use inferential statistics to try to infer from the sample data what the population might think. Or, we use inferential statistics to make judgments of the probability that an observed difference between groups is a dependable one or one that might have happened by chance in this study.

Thus, we use inferential statistics to make inferences from our data to more general conditions; we use descriptive statistics simply to describe what's going on in our data.It is about inferences about population based on the findings about sample.It involves predicton and hypothesis testing.

Advantages :

• Allows a smaller sample size
• Allows better flexibility while determining the percentage of cases.

Disadvantages :

• Infer about population based on the sample data even though population data are not measuring fully so there remain some degree of uncertainty
• Some inferential test require educated guess on testing inferential test, so that there remain some uncertainty of user guess.