ABSTRACT

Statistical work is concerned with populations of objects, parts, people, trials or measurements. Such a population may be finite as in the objects, parts, and people or conceptually infinite as in the trials or measurements. Probably the most basic question in all of statistics is the relation between a sample and the population from which it comes. A sample containing a substantial collection of observations is often studied by making a frequency tabulation (of the observations into numerical classes), and then picturing the distribution by some frequency graph such as a histogram. This chapter briefly reviews the behavior of sample statistics for samples drawn at random from a more or less completely specified population.