Statistics is the discipline that concerns the collection, organization, analysis, interpretation, and presentation of data. In applying statistics to a scientific, industrial, or social problem, it is conventional to begin with a statistical population or a statistical model to be studied.

Statistics deals with every aspect of data, including the planning of data collection in terms of the design of surveys and experiments. When census data cannot be collected, statisticians collect data by developing specific experiment designs and survey samples.

Two main statistical methods are used in data analysis: descriptive statistics, which summarize data from a sample using indexes such as the mean or standard deviation, and inferential statistics, which draw conclusions from data that are subject to random variation.