Math 225 Course Notes


Section 5.2: Sampling Distributions


Key Concepts

A sampling distribution describes the possible values that a statistic can attain, and the probability that the statistic attains those values. In practice only one sample is conducted, and only a single statistic is computed. The sampling distribution describes what would happen if you could hypothetically repeat the random sampling process a very large number of times.

The important qualities of a sampling distribution are its center, spread, and shape.


Definition

The sampling distribution of a statistic is the distribution of all possible values of the statistic computed from samples of the same size randomly drawn from the same population.



Last modified: Feb 19, 1996

Bret Larget, larget@mathcs.duq.edu