STATS 10 Chapter Notes - Chapter 9: Confidence Interval, Test Statistic, Null Hypothesis
Document Summary
In chapter 7, we learned to estimate population parameters by collecting a random sample from that population. We used the collected data to calculate a statistic (which was then used to estimate the parameter) We used the statistic p to estimate the parameter p. In chapter 9, we"re going to learn to use the statistic x to estimate the parameter . In general, we want to know how close our estimate is to the truth (ie. how far away that statistic is, typically, from the parameter) Just as we did in chapter 7 with p we now examine 3 characteristics of the behavior of the sample mean: By understanding these characteristics, we"ll be able to measure how well our estimate performs and thus make better decisions. The reason why the sample mean is a useful estimator for the population mean is that the sample mean is: Very precise (with a sufficiently large sample size)
