ABSTRACT

Generally, when statisticians try to draw some conclusions about a population of interest, it is often cheaper and more convenient to draw these conclusions using a sample drawn from the population. Some of the samples used may arise from experiments that are deliberately planned and executed to elicit information of interest. Others may arise from pure observational studies in which the statistician does not control the process but simply observes the responses of the process. Statistical inference, a major area of statistical endeavor, is built around a practical way of obtaining information about populations, namely, sampling. One of the problems commonly dealt with in inferential statistics is the estimation of population values called parameters. A statistic can be used to estimate parameters like mean, median, and variance of a population. Population proportions and the rth moments about the mean are also examples of parameters.