The Statistical sample reference article from the English Wikipedia on 24-Apr-2004 (provided by Fixed Reference: snapshots of Wikipedia from wikipedia.org)

Statistical sample

A sample is that part of a population which is actually observed. In normal scientific practice, we demand that it be selected in such a way as to avoid presenting a biaseded view of the population. If statistical inference is to be used, there must be a way of assigning known probabilities of selection to each sample. If the probabilities of different samples are all equal, for example, the method is called simple random sampling.

See also: Sampling (statistics)

This is the "Statistical sample" reference article from the English Wikipedia. All text is available under the terms of the GNU Free Documentation License. See also our Disclaimer.