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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 ...
(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.
A visual representation of the sampling process. In statistics, quality assurance, and survey methodology, sampling is the selection of a subset or a statistical sample (termed sample for short) of individuals from within a statistical population to estimate characteristics of the whole population. The subset is meant to reflect the whole ...
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)} ).
The best example of the plug-in principle, the bootstrapping method. Bootstrapping is a statistical method for estimating the sampling distribution of an estimator by sampling with replacement from the original sample, most often with the purpose of deriving robust estimates of standard errors and confidence intervals of a population parameter like a mean, median, proportion, odds ratio ...
For example, the family of normal distributions has two parameters, the mean and the variance: if those are specified, the distribution is known exactly. The family of chi-squared distributions can be indexed by the number of degrees of freedom : the number of degrees of freedom is a parameter for the distributions, and so the family is thereby ...