Book Image

Clojure for Data Science

By : Henry Garner
Book Image

Clojure for Data Science

By: Henry Garner

Overview of this book

Table of Contents (18 chapters)
Clojure for Data Science
Credits
About the Author
Acknowledgments
About the Reviewer
www.PacktPub.com
Preface
Index

Samples and populations


The words "sample" and "population" mean something very particular to statisticians. A population is the entire collection of entities that a researcher wishes to understand or draw conclusions about. For example, in the second half of the 19th century, Gregor Johann Mendel, the originator of genetics, recorded observations about pea plants. Although he was studying specific plants in a laboratory, his objective was to understand the underlying mechanisms behind heredity in all possible pea plants.

Note

Statisticians refer to the group of entities from which a sample is drawn as the population, whether or not the objects being studied are people.

Since populations may be large—or in the case of Mendel's pea plants, infinite—we must study representative samples and draw inferences about the population from them. To distinguish the measurable attributes of our samples from the inaccessible attributes of the population, we use the word statistics to refer to the sample...