The estimate or prediction of a population parameter is often
referred to as a point estimate. That is to say, the estimate is a
single value based on a sample, a statistic, which is then used
to estimate the corresponding value in the population, a parameter.
The average (mean) of our sample can be used as an estimator of
the population mean. We could have chosen to use the median or mode
to estimate the population mean as well. However, for the remainder
of this section we will deal with estimating the mean of a
population only.
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