Data engineering for intelligent inference: Statistical data

Abstract

Statistical processing of data has been around for a long time. In biblical times people were concerned with census data for tax collection purposes. The history of usage of statistics data prior to the eighteenth century is not well documented. In the eighteenth century mathematicians, like Pascal, when they invented probability theory, found the use of statistical data for estimating probabilities. The use of relative frequencies for estimating probabilities of events, can be considered as the first attempt of data engineering for intelligent inference. Of course, data engineering did not surface until the invention of computers, which was another two centuries later. In these two centuries Statistics developed as a science, specially in the later part of the nineteenth and the first half of the twentieth century. The age of computers followed the maturity of the science of statistics.