Editing Multivariate statistics (section)

{{Short description|Simultaneous observation and analysis of more than one outcome variable}}
{{redirect|Multivariate analysis|the usage in mathematics|Multivariable calculus}}

'''Multivariate statistics''' is a subdivision of [[statistics]] encompassing the simultaneous observation and analysis of more than one [[outcome variable]], i.e., ''[[multivariate random variable]]s''. 
Multivariate statistics concerns understanding the different aims and background of each of the different forms of multivariate analysis, and how they relate to each other. The practical application of multivariate statistics to a particular problem may involve several types of univariate and multivariate analyses in order to understand the relationships between variables and their relevance to the problem being studied.

In addition, multivariate statistics is concerned with multivariate [[probability distribution]]s, in terms of both
:*how these can be used to represent the distributions of observed data;
:*how they can be used as part of [[statistical inference]], particularly where several different quantities are of interest to the same analysis.

Certain types of problems involving multivariate data, for example [[simple linear regression]] and [[multiple regression]], are ''not'' usually considered to be special cases of multivariate statistics because the analysis is dealt with by considering the (univariate) conditional distribution of a single outcome variable given the other variables.