Statistical Inference

In the previous chapter we have seen how to describe a sample in order to produce potentially interesting hypotheses about its population. Some of the descriptions we have seen are based on graphical representations that are easily interpreted by humans, while others are based on parameters that summarize important properties of the sample distribution. In this chapter we see how to infer predictions about a population. To this end we explore the relationship between sample parameters and population parameters and we propose some methods, both theoretical and computational, to assess the quality of parameter estimates from a sample.