Introduction

We shall refresh some basic notions to get focussed. Statistics is the science (or art) of interpreting data when there are random events operating in conjunction with systematic events. Mostly there is a pattern to the randomness which allows us to make sense of the observations. Distribution functions and their derivatives called density functions or probability functions are mathematical ways of describing the randomness.

In this course, we shall be mostly studying parametric distributions where the mathematical description of randomness is in terms of parameters because we can assume we know the general form of the distribution. There is another topic in statistics called non-parametric statistics where the distribution function is parameter free. Order Statistics are one example of non-parametric statistics.