Chapter 7 Point and Interval Estimators
A grade is an inadequate report of an inaccurate judgment by a biased and variable judge of the extent to which a student has attained an undefined level of mastery of an unknown proportion of an indefinite amount of material.
– Paul Dressel
7.1 Introduction
One of the primary objectives of inferential statistics is estimation of population characteristics, or descriptors, on the basis of limited information contained in a sample. The population descriptors are formalized by a statistical model, which can be postulated at various levels of specificity: a broad class of models, a parametric family, or a fully specific unique model. Often, a functional or distributional form is fully specified but dependent on one or more parameters. Such a model is called parametric. When the model is parametric, the task of estimation is to find the best possible sample counterparts as estimators for the parameters and to assess the accuracy of the estimators.
The estimation procedure follows standard rules. Usually, a ...
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