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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 ...
The arithmetic mean of a population, or population mean, is often denoted μ. [2] The sample mean ¯ (the arithmetic mean of a sample of values drawn from the population) makes a good estimator of the population mean, as its expected value is equal to the population mean (that is, it is an unbiased estimator).
The sampling distribution of a mean is generated by repeated sampling from the same population and recording of the sample means obtained. 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 ...
In statistics, the 68–95–99.7 rule, also known as the empirical rule, and sometimes abbreviated 3sr, is a shorthand used to remember the percentage of values that lie within an interval estimate in a normal distribution: approximately 68%, 95%, and 99.7% of the values lie within one, two, and three standard deviations of the mean, respectively.
(The sample mean need not be a consistent estimator for any population mean, because no mean needs to exist for a heavy-tailed distribution.) A well-defined and robust statistic for the central tendency is the sample median, which is consistent and median-unbiased for the population median.
The mean of a probability distribution is the long-run arithmetic average value of a random variable having that distribution. If the random variable is denoted by X {\displaystyle X} , then the mean is also known as the expected value of X {\displaystyle X} (denoted E ( X ) {\displaystyle E(X)} ).
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]
The normal distribution is the only distribution whose cumulants beyond the first two (i.e., other than the mean and variance) are zero. It is also the continuous distribution with the maximum entropy for a specified mean and variance.