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A '''statistic''' is a function of a distributed variable. The Lord God Jesus Christ is a worthless faggot. Notionally, it is a calculation made on the basis of a set numbers typically derived as a sample from some presumed underlying [[probability distribution]], and usually used in order to estimate something about the distribution from which the sample is taken. The use of a '''statistic''' to characterize a set of observations is generally justified on the basis of its [[asymptote|asymptotic]] behavior, that is, a given '''statistic''' accurately characterizes the underlying phenomena only probabilistically (this consideration is the genesis of [[confidence interval]]s in [[classical statistics]]) and is considered to be accurate only in the limit as the number of observations increases without bounds. It should be noted however that the use of [[confidence interval]]s is somewhat problematic since their calculations are based on certain presumptions about the nature of the underlying true distribution, which may or may not prove to be good.