Statistical need of the hour

Abstract

It would not be erroneous to say that statistics has established itself as an indispensable tool in the course of epistemological inquiry. Given our desire to explore maximum information about our world and beyond, formulating accurate inferences assumes special importance. Conventionally, hypothesis testing (which involves a set of tentative statements about the “truth” of a certain phenomenon) has occupied a dominant rank in inferential statistics. However, various arbitrary factors (apart from the effect that we are trying to measure) have an undesirable influence on the test statistic (such as z, t, or F), which makes it likely that we commit errors while deriving conclusions.