Question

Traditionally textbooks on statistics (or biostatistics) began with coverage of descriptive statistics (calculating mean, standard deviation, and the like) and probability. In contrast, most contemporary statistics textbooks begin with the topic of exploratory data analysis (using graphical and quantitative methods to learn properties of data, before further analysis is done). Why do you think newer textbooks made this change and do you think it was a good idea?

Answer 1

Actually to learn mean, median, standard deviation and like these METHODS we need to know what is data type, how many data types are there. which kind data are allowed to perform such calculations. obviously you can not add some qualitative data and you can not find it's mean. And to understand the scatterness about a data set we need to know the scatter plot of this. then we can understand clearly what is standard deviation and how data points are deviating. we can not be sure about to find probability density function and expectation without knowing the properties of data I mean we should know whether data type is discrete or continuous . so any book should follow this sequence as contents... ABOUT DATA TYPE>QUANTITATIVE METHODS AND THEIR PROPERTIES > CALCULATION METHODS> DISCRETE MATHEMATICS> PROBABILITY.

i think newer text books had good idea.