Page 31 - Pharmaceutical Analytical Chemistry III

Samples and Populations

A population is the collection of all measurements of interest to
the experimenter, while a sample is a subset of measurements
selected from the population.

As an example of a real population, consider a production
run of multivitamin tablets that produces hundreds of
thousands of tablets. Although the population is finite, we
usually would not have the time or resources to test all the
tablets for quality control purposes. Hence, we select a
sample of tablets for analysis according to statistical

sampling principles. We then infer the characteristics of the

population from those of the sample.