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In statistics, a sampling distribution or finite-sample distribution is the probability distribution of a given random-sample-based statistic.If an arbitrarily large number of samples, each involving multiple observations (data points), were separately used in order to compute one value of a statistic (such as, for example, the sample mean or sample variance) for each sample, then the sampling ...
If the set is a sample from the whole population, then the unbiased sample variance can be calculated as 1017.538 that is the sum of the squared deviations about the mean of the sample, divided by 11 instead of 12. A function VAR.S in Microsoft Excel gives the unbiased sample variance while VAR.P is for population variance.
using a target variance for an estimate to be derived from the sample eventually obtained, i.e., if a high precision is required (narrow confidence interval) this translates to a low target variance of the estimator. the use of a power target, i.e. the power of statistical test to be applied once the sample is collected.
This results in an approximately-unbiased estimator for the variance of the sample mean. [48] This means that samples taken from the bootstrap distribution will have a variance which is, on average, equal to the variance of the total population. Histograms of the bootstrap distribution and the smooth bootstrap distribution appear below.
This forms a distribution of different means, and this distribution has its own mean and variance. Mathematically, the variance of the sampling mean distribution obtained is equal to the variance of the population divided by the sample size. This is because as the sample size increases, sample means cluster more closely around the population mean.
This shows that the sample mean and sample variance are independent. This can also be shown by Basu's theorem, and in fact this property characterizes the normal distribution – for no other distribution are the sample mean and sample variance independent. [3]
Thus the sample mean is a random variable, not a constant, and consequently has its own distribution. For a random sample of N observations on the j th random variable, the sample mean's distribution itself has mean equal to the population mean () and variance equal to /, where is the population variance.
Correction factor versus sample size n.. When the random variable is normally distributed, a minor correction exists to eliminate the bias.To derive the correction, note that for normally distributed X, Cochran's theorem implies that () / has a chi square distribution with degrees of freedom and thus its square root, / has a chi distribution with degrees of freedom.