Chapter 7: Confidence Intervals for One Population

Statistical inference is used to draw conclusions about a population based on a sample. We can use the probability distributions and Central Limit Theorem to understand what is going on in the population. The population can be difficult to measure so we take a sample from that population and use descriptive statistics to measure the sample. We can then use those sample statistics to infer back to what is happening in our population. Although there are many types of statistical inference tools, we will only cover some of the more common techniques.

Distinguishing between a population and a sample is important in statistics. We frequently use a representative sample to generalize a population.