statistical population
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complete set of items that share at least one property in common that is the subject of a statistical analysis
~2 min read
Encyclopedic overview
In statistics, a population is a set of similar items which is of interest for some question or experiment. A statistical population can be a group of existing objects (e.g. the set of all stars within the Milky Way galaxy) or a hypothetical and potentially infinite group of objects conceived as a generalization from experience (e.g. the set of all possible hands in a game of poker).
In statistical inference, the population is modelled by a probability distribution with unknown parameters. By analyzing a subset of the population, it is then possible to estimate the population parameters using the appropriate sample statistics.
Excerpted from Wikipedia’s “statistical population” article, available under the CC BY-SA 4.0 licence.