Critical Care

official impact factor 4.60

Review

Statistics review 2: Samples and populations

Elise Whitley1 and Jonathan Ball2

Author Affiliations

1 Lecturer in Medical Statistics, University of Bristol, UK

2 Lecturer in Intensive Care Medicine, St George's Hospital Medical School, London, UK

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Critical Care 2002, 6:143-148 doi:10.1186/cc1473

Published: 7 February 2002

Abstract

The previous review in this series introduced the notion of data description and outlined some of the more common summary measures used to describe a dataset. However, a dataset is typically only of interest for the information it provides regarding the population from which it was drawn. The present review focuses on estimation of population values from a sample.

Keywords:
confidence interval; normal distribution; reference range; standard error