Lecture Notes 4 Estimation Today we will put our understanding of the Normal distribution to use in order to be able to infer properties of populations.
Induction is always risky.
Just because the sun has risen on earth every day for the last 4 billion years is no guarantee that it will rise tomorrow. What statistical inference allows us to do is quantify the risk of induction, at least under certain assumptions. Today we are going to look at estimates of the means and standard deviations of populations based on samples of that population. In order to make these interval estimates, we will mostly rely on the assumption that the population is normally distributed. As part of these methods, we will define the t distribution and the chi-square distributions, which we will revisit in our discussion of significance testing next week.