I didn’t like statistics until I realized the real world applicability of them in my research, and now I find myself hungry to not only use methods, but to really understand what they mean. These are some quick notes for things that I might want to reference in the coming years. I think a good way to learn (what I’m currently trying to do) is to read about basic concepts somewhere online, and then to read the detailed methods sections of some papers you are interested in, and look up anything that you don’t understand.
Null distribution - what a statistical test plot of the distribution would look like given that there are no significant differences Hypothesis test - purpose is to be able to determine how large differences must be in order to make decision that effects are REAL and not due to CHANCE.
The probability of an event is the theoretical relative frequency of the event in a model of the population.