what is the difference between a sample and a population??
Population vs Sample. The main difference between a population and sample has to do with how observations are assigned to the data set. A population includes all of the elements from a set of data. A sample consists one or more observations drawn from the population.
In statistics it is very important to distinguish between population and sample. A population is defined as all members (e.g. occurrences, prices, annual returns) of a specified group. Population is the whole group. A sample is a part of a population that is used to describe the characteristics (e.g. mean or standard deviation) of the whole population. The size of a sample can be less than 1%, or 10%, or 60% of the population, but it is never the whole population. Population vs. Sample Variance and Standard Deviation