From the course: Designing Big Data Healthcare Studies, Part One

Unlock the full course today

Join today to access over 22,400 courses taught by industry experts or purchase this course individually.

Populations vs. samples

Populations vs. samples - R Tutorial

From the course: Designing Big Data Healthcare Studies, Part One

Start my 1-month free trial

Populations vs. samples

- [Instructor] Thank you for joining me for this video where we will go over the concepts of populations and samples in epidemiology. Let's start with defining populations. The term refers to every single person in a defined population, meaning we have to come up with some boundaries defining the population, but everyone who meets that definition is then by design in the population. And the numbers we use to describe that population, like rates of disease for example, are called parameters and these are exact numbers. For example, the number of people who live in the United States is a parameter. It's some exact number you could calculate if you had data on everyone who lives in the United States. So it follows that a sample is a group of people who have been selected from a defined population like a group of people who live in the United States. Numbers derived from samples are called statistics. So if someone says that the rate of overdose deaths is high in Massachusetts, and that's…

Contents