Regarding Descriptive and Inferential Statistics

[Sanit arora]

Suppose for a population, we have a sample of data which says 70% of people want candidate 1 to win and 30% of people want candidate 2 to win, then from that data do we infer about the population that candidate 1 will win(inferential statistics), or do we get a summary of the preference of people (descriptive statistics)?

[Sumit Surana]

Hi,

From what I understand, if you take the whole population and try to find out who wants which candidate to win, then you get is summary of the people who wants which candidate to win (descriptive statistics). But if you take a small random sample from the population and try to use the results drawn from sample to infer the idea about the preference of population, it becomes inferential (thus inferential statistics)

[Sanit arora]

Right. I guess, it all depends on the context of the problem. 

Thanks for simplifying it.