Biology 2244A/B Chapter 13: Chap 13Sampling distributions
2 Nov 2016
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Understand the definition of a sampling distribution. Distinguish between the distribution of a variable in a sample, the distribution of a variable in a population, and the sampling distribution of a sample statistic. A parameter is a number that describes the population. In statistical practice the value of a parameter is not known, because we cannot examine the entire population. A statistic is a number that can be computed from the sample data without making use of any unknown parameters. In practice, we often use a statistic to estimate an unknown parameter: when dealing with quantitative data we write mu for the mean of a population. Sample mean is the average of the observations in the sample. It is an estimate of the mean mu of the underlying population: when dealing with categorical data we use notation p to indicate the population proportion of individuals of a given type.
