ESS210B
Prof. Jin-Yi Yu
Parameters and Statistics
qParameters: Numbers that describe a population. For example, the population mean (m)and standard deviation (s).
q Statistics: Numbers that are
calculated from a sample.
qA given population has
only one value of a particular parameter, but a
particular statistic calculated from different samples of the population has values that are generally different, both from each other, and from the parameter
that the statistics is designed to estimate.
qThe science of
statistics is concerned with how to draw reliable,
quantifiable inferences from statistics about parameters.
(from Middleton 2000)