1. The eternal tension in statistics...

2. Between what you really really want (the population) but can never get to...

3. So you have to make do (with the sample) you can estimate the population, make educated guesses,

4. but bottomline is “you can never have the population”

5. An investigator usually wants to generalize about a class of individuals/things (the population) For example: in forecasting the results of elections, population is all eligible voters for the Furniture.com class group: all potential users of Furniture.com

6. Usually there are some numerical facts about the population (parameters) which you want to estimate You can do that by measuring the same aspect in the sample (statistic) Depending on the accuracy of your measurement, and how representative your sample is, you can make inferences about the population

7. The 1936 election: the literary digest poll Candidates: Democrat FD Roosevelt and Republican Alfred Landon The Literary Digest: had called the winner in every election since 1916 Its prediction: Roosevelt will get 43% polled 2.4 million people!

8. The election results The election result62 The Digest prediction43

10. I'm not an outlier; I just haven't found my distribution yet. --- Ronan Conroy