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The sample size is an important feature of any empirical study in which the goal is to make inferences about a population from a sample. In practice, the sample size used in a study is usually determined based on the cost, time, or convenience of collecting the data, and the need for it to offer sufficient statistical power .
In statistics, a sampling distribution or finite-sample distribution is the probability distribution of a given random-sample-based statistic.For an arbitrarily large number of samples where each sample, involving multiple observations (data points), is separately used to compute one value of a statistic (for example, the sample mean or sample variance) per sample, the sampling distribution is ...
Where is the sample size, = / is the fraction of the sample from the population, () is the (squared) finite population correction (FPC), is the unbiassed sample variance, and (¯) is some estimator of the variance of the mean under the sampling design. The issue with the above formula is that it is extremely rare to be able to directly estimate ...
In Poisson sampling each element of the population may have a different probability of being included in the sample. In Bernoulli sampling, the probability is equal for all the elements. Because each element of the population is considered separately for the sample, the sample size is not fixed but rather follows a binomial distribution.
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.
For example, one may administer a test to a number of individuals. If it is assumed that each person's score (0 ≤ θ ≤ 1) is drawn from a population-level beta distribution, then an important statistic is the mean of this population-level distribution. The mean and sample size parameters are related to the shape parameters α and β via [3]
Generally Bessel's correction is an approach to reduce the bias due to finite sample size. Such finite-sample bias correction is also needed for other estimates like skew and kurtosis, but in these the inaccuracies are often significantly larger. To fully remove such bias it is necessary to do a more complex multi-parameter estimation.
Frequency distribution: a table that displays the frequency of various outcomes in a sample. Relative frequency distribution: a frequency distribution where each value has been divided (normalized) by a number of outcomes in a sample (i.e. sample size). Categorical distribution: for discrete random variables with a finite set of values.