Parametric Statistics

Parametric statistics is a branch of statistics that assumes that the data has come from a type of probability distribution and makes inferences about the parameters of the distribution. Most well-known elementary statistical methods are parametric.

Generally speaking parametric methods make more assumptions than non-parametric methods. If those extra assumptions are correct, parametric methods can produce more accurate and precise estimates. They are said to have more statistical power. However, if those assumptions are incorrect, parametric methods can be very misleading. For that reason they are often not considered robust. On the other hand, parametric formulae are often simpler to write down and faster to compute. In some, but definitely not all cases, their simplicity makes up for their non-robustness, especially if care is taken to examine diagnostic statistics.