Inferential statistics is used to draw conclusions that apply to more than just the data being studied. This is necessary when analysis must be conducted on a smaller, representative dataset when the true population is too large or difficult to study. Because the analysis is done on a subset of the total data, the conclusions that can be reached with inferential statistics are never 100 percent accurate and are instead only probabilistic bets. Election polling, for example, relies on surveying a small percentage of citizens to gauge the sentiments of the entire population. As we saw during the
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