Nonparametric statistics

Nonparametric statistics are statistics not based on parameterized families of probability distributions. They include both descriptive and inferential statistics. The typical parameters are the mean, variance, etc. Unlike parametric statistics, nonparametric statistics make no assumptions about the probability distributions of the variables being assessed. The difference between parametric models and non-parametric models is that the former has a fixed number of parameters, while the latter grows the number of parameters with the amount of training data. Note that the non-parametric model does not have any parameters: parameters are determined by the training data, not the model.

Definitions

In statistics, the term "non-parametric statistics" has at least two different meanings: