What is the importance of statistics in geography?

Answer 1

IMPORTANCE OF STUDING STATISTICS IN GEOGRAPHY.

In recent years, statistics has occupied a dominant place in society. In the light of its significance, its scope as well as importance highlighted

Importance in Defense and War:

Statistical tools are very useful in the fields of defense and war because it helps to compare the military strength of different countries in terms of man power, tanks, war-aeroplanes, missiles etc. Moreover, it helps in planning future military strategy of the country. It helps to estimate the loss due to war. It helps to arrange the war finance.

Statistics and Economic Planning:

Modern age is the age of planning and without statistics planning is inconceivable. The days of laissez faire had gone and state intervention in every walk of life has become universal in character. Our future depends on proper planning. Thus, planning is only successful on accurate analysis of complex statistical data.

In India, the various plans that have been prepared or implemented, planners have made use of statistical data. Moreover, in our country, National Sample Survey Scheme was introduced to collect the statistical data for the use of planning. Statistical apparatus are employed not only to construct the plans but the success of every plan is judged by the use of statistical tools.

Statistics and State:

Statistics are the eyes of state as they help in administration. In the ancient times, the ruling kings and chiefs have to rely heavily on statistics to frame suitable military and fiscal policies. Similarly, modern states make tremendous use of statistical tools on various problems.

Before, implementing any policy, a state has to examine its pros and cons. For instance, before suggesting any remedial measures of the evil of crime, the state requires to make a deep statistical investigation of the problem.

Similarly, state conducts the population census to estimate the figures of national income and the prosperity of the country. In this way, state is the most single unit which not only collects the largest amount of statistics but also needs statistics on a very extensive scale.

statistics may only have valid interpretations for the area and subarea configuration over which they are calculated.

Boundary delineation

The location of a study area boundary and the positioning of internal boundaries affect various descriptive statistics. With respect to measures such as the mean or standard deviation, the study area size alone may have large implications; consider a study of per capita income within a city, if confined to the inner city, income levels are likely to be lower because of a less affluent population, if expanded to include the suburbs or surrounding communities, income levels will become greater with the influence of homeowner populations. Because of this problem, absolute descriptive statistics such as the mean, standard deviation, and variance should be evaluated comparatively only in relation to a particular study area. In the determination of internal boundaries this is also true, as these statistics may only have valid interpretations for the area and subarea configuration over which they are calculated.

Descriptive spatial statistics

See main article Spatial descriptive statistics

For summarizing point pattern analysis, a set of descriptive spatial statistics has been developed that are areal equivalents to nonspatial measures. Since geographers are particularly concerned with the analysis of locational data, these descriptive spatial statistics (geostatistics) are often applied to summarize point patterns and to describe the degree of spatial variability of some phenomena.

Spatial measures of central tendency

An example here is the idea of a center of population, of which a particular example is the mean center of U.S. population. Several different ways of defining a center are available:

• Mean center: The mean is an important measure of central tendency, which when extended to a set of points, located on a Cartesian coordinate system, the average location, centroid or mean center, can be determined.

• The weighted mean center is analogous to frequencies in the calculation of grouped statistics, such as the weighted mean. A point may represent a retail outlet, while its frequency will represent the volume of sales within the particular store.

• Median center or Euclidean center and in the median center of United States population. This is related to the Manhattan distance.

. Statistics and Business:

Statistics is extremely useful in modern activities of business. Business is full of risks and uncertainties. According to Boddington, "A successful businessman is one whose estimates most closely approach accuracy". Every success in business depends on precision in forecasting.

Thus, a businessman must make a proper analysis of the past records to forecast the future business conditions. Moreover, every business man has to make use of the statistical tools to estimate the trend of prices and of economic activities. In short, business involves risk and when there is risk, it is better to have a calculated risk.

References

• Duncan, Otis Dudley, Raymond Paul Cuzzort and Beverly Duncan (1977). Statistical Geography: Problems in Analyzing Areal Data. Greenwood Press. ISBN 0-8371-9676-0.

• Dickinson, G.C. (1973). Statistical mapping and the presentation of statistics. Edward Arnold. ISBN 0-7131-5641-4.