Math 225 Course Notes
Section 5.2: Sampling Distributions
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.
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