6.11 Business employees. There are more than
7 million businesses in the United States with paid
employees. The mean number of employees in these
businesses is about 16. A university selects a random
sample of 100 businesses in Colorado and finds that
they average about 11 employees. Is each of the bold
numbers a parameter or a statistic?
A parameter is a function of population values which is used to represent the certain characteristic of the population. For e.g. population mean, population variance etc. Here 16 is the population parameter because it represents the average number of employees of the entire 7 million businesses in the US.
Any quantity calculated from sample values and does not contain any unknown parameter is known as a statistic. Here 11 is a statistics because it is a sample mean and it does not contain any unknown parameter.
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