Im confused about terms like population, sample space, and universe seem similar. Whats the difference between them?
There is not much practical difference between them, but they imply very different things. Elementary statistics texts and courses tend to use population to describe the thing from which samples are drawn. CyberStats, for example, defines population as the large collection of individuals about which information is desired. One difficulty with this definition is that if we are not careful we will interpret individuals according to its common usage in which an individual is a person. In fact, the individuals CyberStats is referring to may be people, fish, rocks, snowstorms, or any other discrete entity. A further difficulty with the term population itself is that we tend to envision a population as a fixed set of entities, when in fact this need not be the case. For example, suppose police investigators were at Foxwoods casino and trying to determine if the dice at the craps table are loaded. One way to do so would be by rolling the dice several (N) times i.e. by taking a sample and seei
