Recent years have witnessed a strong movement away from what might be termed classical statistics to a more empirical, data-oriented approach to statistics, sometimes termed exploratory data analysis, or EDA. This movement has been active among professional statisticians for twenty or twenty-five years but has begun permeating the area of statistical education for non-statisticians only in the past five to ten years. At this point, there seems to be little doubt that EDA approaches to applied statistics will gain support over classical approaches in the years to come. That is not to say that classical statistics will disappear. The two approaches begin with different assumptions and have different objectives, but both are important. These differences will be outlined in this article.
The CAUSE Research Group is supported in part by a member initiative grant from the American Statistical Association’s Section on Statistics and Data Science Education