What is a Sampling Distribution?

A sampling distribution is a probability distribution of a statistic obtained from a larger number of samples drawn from a specific population. The sampling distribution of a given population is the distribution of frequencies of a range of different outcomes that could possibly occur for a statistic of a population.

In statistics, a population is the entire pool from which a statistical sample is drawn. A population may refer to an entire group of people, objects, events, hospital visits, or measurements. A population can thus be said to be an aggregate observation of subjects grouped together by a common feature.

A lot of data drawn and used by academicians, statisticians, researchers, marketers, analysts, etc. are actually samples, not populations. A sample is a subset of a population. For example, a medical researcher that wanted to compare the average weight of all babies born in North America from 1995 to 2005 to those born in South America within the same time period cannot within a reasonable amount of time draw the data for the entire population of over a million childbirths that occurred over the ten-year time frame. They will instead only use the weight of, say, 100 babies, in each continent to make a conclusion. The weight of 200 babies used is the sample and the average weight calculated is the sample mean.

Now suppose that instead of taking just one sample of 100 newborn weights from each continent, the medical researcher takes repeated random samples from the general population, and computes the sample mean for each sample group. So, for North America, they pull up data for 100 newborn weights recorded in the US, Canada and Mexico as follows: four 100 samples from select hospitals in the US, five 70 samples from Canada and three 150 records from Mexico, for a total of 1,200 weights of newborn babies grouped in 12 sets. They also collect a sample data of 100 birth weights from each of the 12 countries in South America.

The average weight computed for each sample set is the sampling distribution of the mean. Not just the mean can be calculated from a sample. Other statistics, such as the standard deviation, variance, proportion, and range can be calculated from sample data. The standard deviation and variance measure the variability of the sampling distribution.

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