Modern Engineering Statistics
Chapter One
Methods of Collecting
and Presenting Data
People make decisions every day, with decision-making logically based on some form of
data. A person who accepts a job and moves to a new city needs to know how long it will
take him/her to drive to work. The person could guess the time by knowing the distance
and considering the traffic likely to be encountered along the route that will be traveled, or
the new employee could drive the route at the anticipated regular time of departure for a
few days before the first day of work.
With the second option, an experiment is performed, which if the test run were performed
under normal road and weather conditions, would lead to a better estimate of the typical
driving time than by merely knowing the distance and the route to be traveled.
Similarly, engineers conduct statistically designed experiments to obtain valuable information
that will enable processes and products to be improved, and much space is devoted
to statistically designed experiments in Chapter 12.
Of course, engineering data a ... read full excerpt from Modern Engineering Statistics ebook
