Population and Sample

Population vs. sample

In statistics, a population includes every possible element that you are interested in measuring, or the entire dataset that you want to draw conclusions about. A statistical population can refer to any type of data, including:

• People
• Organizations
• Objects
• Events
• And more

For instance, a population might be the set of:

• All students at a university
• All the cell phones ever manufactured by a company
• All the forests on Earth

A sample is a subset of a population.

Samples drawn from the above populations might be:

• The math majors at the university
• The cell phones manufactured by the company in the last week
• The forests in Canada

Data professionals use samples to make inferences about populations. In other words, they use the data they collect from a small part of the population to draw conclusions about the population as a whole.