R Statistics Cookbook

Simple random sampling

In many situations, we are interested in taking a sample of the data. There could be multiple reasons for doing this, but in most practical considerations this happens due to budget constraints. For example, what if we have a certain amount people in a neighborhood, and we want to estimate what proportion of them is supporting Candidates A or B in an election? Visiting each one of them would be prohibitively expensive, so we might decide to find a smaller subset that we can visit and ask them who they are going to vote for.

The sample function in R can be used to take a sample with or without the replacement of any arbitrary size. Once a sample is defined, we can sample those units. An interesting question is estimating ...