Scientific Method and Statistics
David J. Hand · Encyclopedia of Biostatistics · 2005
Abstract Statistics is the science of extracting information from data. As such, the methods of statistics are intimately interwoven with ideas of scientific method to formulate scientific explanations of natural phenomena; that is, with ideas of how science progresses and of scientific method. Examples of such common features are the notions of descriptive summaries of data, of experimentation, of model selection and formulation, and of inference from samples of observations.