“Statistics is the grammar of science.”  – Karl Pearson  

Statistics is the art of learning from data. It is concerned with three things: the collection of data, their analysis and statistical inference or interpretation of the data. Most of us think of statistics as science but it is not. Rather, it is a quantitative method of scientific investigations. On the basis of available data, a statistician’s job is to test whether a hypothesis can claim to be a law. Researchers of this field are concerned with the formulation of the methodologies for testing the hypothesis.  

People are using statistics from the very old days. First evidence can be found at the time of 3000 B.C., when the people of ancient Babylonia, China, Egypt took censuses for taxation. In India, the first use of statistics can be found in Kautilya’s Arthashastra (321-296 B.C.). The development of modern-day statistics was started in the 18th century, whereas the study of statistics as a scientific discipline and its application was introduced in India by P. C. Mahalanobis. For the study of statistics, he founded Indian Statistical Institute (ISI) in 1931. From this initiation, India has become one of the main contributing countries in the field of statistics now.  

In this blog, we present the use of statistics in different fields and its recent trends. We discuss the scope and opportunity of learning statistics at Adamas University. Also, we suggest a career guideline for the freshers of this subject.  

Statistics for life: 

We are living in the age of data, where we understand the happenings of the world around us by extracting the knowledge or information inside the data using statistical methods and tools. That is, we need statistical techniques for knowledge discovery in databases. When used correctly, statistics tell us the information of the present state of any system and the derived knowledge guide us about future actions. To understand, how statistics shape our life, knowing or unknowingly, we considered some application areas as below: 

• Weather Forecasts: There are some models built using statistics that analyse the prior weather condition and current weather condition data to predict future weather. 
• Emergency Preparedness: Emergency management agencies move into high gear to be ready to rescue people. Emergency teams rely on statistics to tell them when catastrophe may occur. 
• Predicting Disease: Presently we are using various machine learning techniques, which governs by statistics, to identify the potential causes of a disease or to identify the cancer cells in the human body. 
• Genetics: If any parents are suffering from the diseases that come from their genetic disorder then that disease can potentially be passed on to their children. In statistics, there are strong tools that can determine the chances of a new baby being affected by the disease. 
• Political Campaigns polling results: Whenever there’s an election, the news organizations consult their statistical models predicting the result i.e., who will be the winner.  
• Insurance: The premium that an insurance company charges to a customer is based upon inferences drawn from the relevant previous data using statistical tools. 
• Consumer goods: Any departmental store or leading retailer, keeps track of everything they sell and use statistical tools for analysing their vast store of data about buying pattern and sale trend to calculate what to ship to each store and when. 
• Quality testing: Any manufacturing company make thousands of products every day and must make sure that a good quality item is sold. But a company can’t test each and every item that they sell to the consumer. So the company uses statistics to test just a few, called a sample, of what they make. If the sample passes quality tests, then the company assumes that all the items made in the group, called a batch, are good. 
• Stock market: In the stock market, the price of the stock is predicted by the analysis of the price of the stock in the past few days. Market analysts use statistical tools and models to forecast what is happening in the economy. 
• Recommender system: Recommender systems have appeared as efficient and effective tools for automatically selecting and recommending items according to choices or likeliness of customers by using statistical and machine learning models.  The applications of recommender systems include recommending movies, music, television programs, books, documents, websites, conferences, tourism scenic spots and learning materials, and involve the areas of e-commerce, e-learning, e-library, e-government and e-business services. 

 Recent trend in Statistics: 

As there is the biggest job market for the qualified data science experts, so the demand for qualified person in this field is at boom. The most important requirement of any data science approach is how the information is processed. When we talk about deriving knowledge out of data it is basically digging out the possibilities. Those possibilities in Data Science are known as Statistical Analysis. In the process of data analysis and decision making from the beginning to the end of the complete cycle, there is a requirement of statistics at every single step. So a good statistician can be a good data scientist too. 

Statistics @AdamasUniversity: 

Very few Universities offer programmes like M.Sc. (Tech.) in Statistics and Data Science and B.Sc. (Hons) Statistics & Data Analytics which are a perfect blend of Statistics and Data Science courses and Adamas University is one of them. These programmes are mainly job oriented but one can go for higher studies in this field and become a statistician, data scientist or data engineer. Eligibility criteria for applying in the undergraduate programme is 10+2 or higher secondary with Mathematics or Statistics as a compulsory subject, whereas any graduate student with Mathematics or Statistics courses in their programme can apply for M.Sc. (Tech.) programme.  For admission, students need to clear the AUAT entrance exam along with a personal interview. For further details and enquiry, you can visit the official website of the Department of Mathematics, Adamas University (https://science.adamasuniversity.ac.in/).  

Career Prospect: 

In this modern age of digitalization, things need to be planned and Statistics is one of the most important tools used in this. The most practical application of statistics is in the economic development of the world. Each country uses statistical analysis for this. If the statistical data excites you and if you have the ability to take data, to be able to understand the data, to process the data, to extract the value from it, to visualize the data and to effectively interpret and communicate data then a career as a statistician may be a good fit for you. 

Source: This is Statistics

Following are few job titles to be mentioned: Statisticians, Business Analyst, Market Research Analyst, Professor/Lecturer, Risk Analyst, Data Analyst, Content Analyst, Statistic Trainer, Data Scientist, Actual Analyst, Operations Research Analyst, Biostatistician, Econometrician, etc. The areas like Census, Ecological, Medical, Election, Crime, Education, Film, Cricket, Tourism where these people can work are not limited. There are several companies like Deloitte Consulting, TCS Innovations Labs, Blue Ocean Marketing, BNP Paribas India, Neilson Company, Accenture, HP, GE Capital, HDFC, Cognizant, American Express, RBI, HSBC, Indian Market Research Bureau, Genpact who hire people with these skill sets. Apart from these jobs, students can choose the option of higher studies. After completing post-graduation, a student can take the NET examination for getting admission in PhD in Statistics. Nowadays people with these degrees and knowledge of statistics are working as freelancers and doing consultancy jobs. So, Statistics says a person with good knowledge in statistics will not go jobless.