A Gentle Introduction to Nonparametric Statistics

A large portion of the field of statistics and statistical methods is dedicated to data where the distribution is known. Samples of data where we already know or can easily identify the distribution of are called parametric data. Often, parametric is used to refer to data that was drawn from a Gaussian distribution in common usage. Data in which the distribution is unknown or cannot be easily identified is called nonparametric. In the case where you are working with nonparametric data, specialized nonparametric statistical methods can be used that discard all information about the distribution.