Search results
Results from the WOW.Com Content Network
Sample size determination or estimation is the act of choosing the number of observations or replicates to include in a statistical sample. 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.
The law of truly large numbers (a statistical adage), attributed to Persi Diaconis and Frederick Mosteller, states that with a large enough number of independent samples, any highly implausible (i.e. unlikely in any single sample, but with constant probability strictly greater than 0 in any sample) result is likely to be observed. [1]
The weak law of large numbers (also called Khinchin's law) states that given a collection of independent and identically distributed (iid) samples from a random variable with finite mean, the sample mean converges in probability to the expected value [20]
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 ...
Generally, the first-order inclusion probability of the ith element of the population is denoted by the symbol π i and the second-order inclusion probability that a pair consisting of the ith and jth element of the population that is sampled is included in a sample during the drawing of a single sample is denoted by π ij. [3]
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]
In statistics, asymptotic theory, or large sample theory, is a framework for assessing properties of estimators and statistical tests. Within this framework, it is often assumed that the sample size n may grow indefinitely; the properties of estimators and tests are then evaluated under the limit of n → ∞. In practice, a limit evaluation is ...
To estimate μ based on the first n observations, one can use the sample mean: T n = (X 1 + ... + X n)/n. This defines a sequence of estimators, indexed by the sample size n. From the properties of the normal distribution, we know the sampling distribution of this statistic: T n is itself normally distributed, with mean μ and variance σ 2 /n.