Why Statistics Is the Backbone of Data Science: A Clinic Story

Introduction Many people hear the word statistics and think of dense formulas and confusing charts. As a doctor moving into data science, I have come to see it differently. Programming languages and machine learning get the attention, but statistics is what makes the results trustworthy. It tells you whether a pattern is real, how sure you can be, and what to do next. To show this, I will walk through a made-up but realistic example from a clinic.