Dyr og Data

Statistical thinking — introduction

Gavin Simpson

Aarhus University

Mona Larsen

Aarhus University

Wednesday, 19 August 2026

Statistical thinking

A way of understanding a complex system

System could literally be the whole world or just some tiny aspect of it

Describes the complexity using relatively simple terms

These capture essential aspects of how it works (its structure or function)

Also provide us some idea of how uncertain we are about that knowledge

The thought of being enrolled in a statistics course makes me nervous

Answer on a scale of 1–7

1 — Strongly disagree

2 — Strongly agree

If you feel nervous about starting to learn statistics, you are not alone

I did not like maths and stats when I was first introduced to it

Now look at me — I’m a statistician 🤓

Describe: we want to describe the complex system is a simplified way that we can more easily digest or understand
Decide: we want to make a decision to do something using data, usually in the face of uncertainty
Predict: we want to make predictions for some new situation that we have not observed directly yet

Learn from data: statistics can be a set of tools and way of working that allows us to learn from data. We might develop ideas (hypotheses) and then test those ideas against data to see if they hold up
Aggregation: statistics has been described as the science of throwing away data — we could summarise data from an entire herd of cows with a single number for the most likely yield of milk from an animal

Uncertainty: smoking is very bad for your health, but not everyone who smokes will develop lung cancer. Statistics provides ways to characterize uncertainty and do the things it does in spite of that uncertainty
Sampling from a population: rarely can we have data on everything we want: sampling allows us to say something about everything, a population, based on a small sample of representative observations