Question

Parking at a large university has become a very big problem. University administrators are interested in determining the average parking time (e.g. the time it takes a student to find a parking spot) of its students. An administrator inconspicuously followed 250 students and carefully recorded their parking times. The university is interested in using the information from the sample of 250 students collected to learn information about the entire student parking population. Would this be an application of descriptive or inferential statistics

Answer 1

Inferential statistic

Explanation:

The art of making deductions or data driven predictions from statistical data refers to an aspect of statistics called Inferential statistics. Inferential statistics differs from descriptive statistics which is another aspect which focuses on presenting characteristics of data. Here, we make statistical deductions about the entire population from the results obtained about the sample statistic. In the scenario above, the statistic derived from the sample data will be used to make deductions about the general population of students who park in the university. Therefore, from the statistic obstaied from the sample, we infer about the population.