There are two key concepts that unify classical statistics and encapsulate statistical properties and fitting principles into forms that you can visualize:
• a unifying concept of uncertainty
• two basic fitting machines
These two ideas help unlock the understanding of statistics with intuitive concepts that are based on the foundation laid by mathematical statistics.
Statistics is to science what accounting is to business. It is the craft of weighing and balancing observational evidence. Statistical tests are like credibility audits. But statistical tools can do more than that. They are instruments of discovery that can show unexpected things about data and lead to interesting new ideas. Before using these powerful tools, you need to understand a bit about how they work.