Sampling Distributions

Sampling distributions are the basis for making statistical inferences about a population from a sample. A sampling distribution is a set of samples from which some statistic is calculated. The distribution formed from the statistic computed from each sample is the sampling distribution. If the statistic computed is the mean, for example, then the distribution of means from each sample form the sampling distribution of the mean. One problem solved by sampling distributions is to provide a logical basis for using samples to make inferences about populations. Sampling distributions also provide a measure of variability among a set of sample means. This measure of variability will, in turn, allow one to estimate the likelihood of observing a particular sample mean collected in an experiment to ...