It is argued that a main aim of statistics is to produce statistical procedures which in this article are defined as algorithms with inputs and outputs. The structure and properties of such procedures are investigated with special reference to topological and testing considerations. Procedures...

The first example involves the real data given in Table 1 which are the results of an interlaboratory test. The boxplots are shown in Fig. 1 where the dotted line denotes the mean of the observations and the solid line the median. We note that only the results of the Laboratories 1 and 3 lie...