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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 ...
The sampling distribution of a mean is generated by repeated sampling from the same population and recording the sample mean per sample. 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 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 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.
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 sampling distribution of converges to normality much faster than the sampling distribution of , [17] as the logarithmic transform removes much of the asymmetry. [18] Other functions of the chi-squared distribution converge more rapidly to a normal distribution. Some examples are:
Firstly, if the true population mean is unknown, then the sample variance (which uses the sample mean in place of the true mean) is a biased estimator: it underestimates the variance by a factor of (n − 1) / n; correcting this factor, resulting in the sum of squared deviations about the sample mean divided by n-1 instead of n, is called ...
The normal distribution with density () (mean and variance >) has the following properties: It is symmetric around the point =, which is at the same time the mode, the median and the mean of the distribution. [22]