Sampling distributions
The bridge between one sample and the population, and the reason inference works at all.
5 terms
Central limit theoremThe central limit theorem says the sample mean's sampling distribution becomes approximately normal as the sample size grows, whatever the population's shape.Point estimateA point estimate is a single number computed from sample data and used as the best guess for an unknown population parameter.Sampling distributionA sampling distribution is the distribution of a statistic across all possible samples of the same size drawn from a population.Standard errorThe standard error is the standard deviation of a statistic's sampling distribution, showing how much the statistic typically varies from sample to sample.Unbiased estimatorAn unbiased estimator is a statistic whose average value across all samples equals the true parameter, so it has no systematic tendency to be too high or low.