Glossary
Statistician Terms & Vocabulary
15 essential statistician terms with plain-English definitions: the vocabulary you’ll hear in training and on day one.
Key statistician vocabulary
These 15 terms come up constantly in statistician training, on the job and in interviews. Knowing them helps you follow instructions, document accurately and sound prepared.
- Bayesian
- Probability updated with evidence.
- Bias
- Systematic error.
- Biostatistics
- Statistics for health.
- Confidence interval
- Range of plausible values.
- Confounder
- Variable that distorts results.
- Effect size
- How big a difference is.
- Hypothesis test
- Testing a claim.
- Multiple comparisons
- Many tests at once.
- p-value
- Probability of results if no effect exists.
- Power
- Chance to detect an effect.
- Randomization
- Assigning by chance.
- Regression
- Modeling relationships.
- Sample size
- Number of subjects.
- SAP
- Statistical analysis plan.
- Survival analysis
- Time-to-event analysis.
Practice these terms
Test yourself with the free Statistician practice test: it includes vocabulary questions built from this list. For a complete course, see Statistician training.
Browse terms from every career in our career glossary.