Karl Pearson and “Applied” Statistics

[摘要] Karl Pearson’s statistical innovations have led to the developmentof several mathematical statistics techniques. His mathematicalcontributions to the theory of evolution include afamily of univariate probability distributions (referred to asPearson’s family of distributions), which is found to be usefuleven today for fitting on data arising from various scientificdisciplines (physics, biology, anthropology, economics,etc.). Frequency curve (histogram) for continuous data, acommonly used non-parametric density estimator, owes itsorigin to him. Pearson’s correlation coefficient is a populardescriptive measure of the linear relationship between twocontinuous random variables. This article aims to highlight afew of his fundamental ideas.

[学科分类] 社会科学、人文和艺术（综合）

[关键词] Statistics;testing of hypotheses;histogram;correlation;regression;Pearson’s family of distributions;chi-squared test;correlation coefficient.