"By a small sample we may judge of the whole piece." (Miguel de Cervantes, "Don Quixote de la Mancha", 1605–1615)
"The postulate of randomness thus resolves itself into the question, 'of what population is this a random sample?' which must frequently be asked by every practical statistician." (Ronald Fisher, "On the Mathematical Foundation of Theoretical Statistics", Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society of London Vol. A222, 1922)
"If the chance of error alone were the sole basis for evaluating methods of inference, we would never reach a decision, but would merely keep increasing the sample size indefinitely." (C West Churchman, "Theory of Experimental Inference", 1948)
"A good sample-design is lost if it is not carried out according to plans." (W Edwards Deming, "Some Theory of Sampling", 1950)
"Sampling is the science and art of controlling and measuring the reliability of useful statistical information through the theory of probability." (William E Deming, "Some Theory of Sampling", 1950)
"Almost any sort of inquiry that is general and not particular involves both sampling and measurement […]. Further, both the measurement and the sampling will be imperfect in almost every case. We can define away either imperfection in certain cases. But the resulting appearance of perfection is usually only an illusion."
"By sampling we can learn only about collective properties of populations, not about properties of individuals. We can study the average height, the percentage who wear hats, or the variability in weight of college juniors [...]. The population we study may be small or large, but there must be a population - and what we are studying must be a population characteristic. By sampling, we cannot study individuals as particular entities with unique idiosyncrasies; we can study regularities (including typical variabilities as well as typical levels) in a population as exemplified by the individuals in the sample." (Frederick Mosteller et al, "Principles of Sampling", Journal of the American Statistical Association Vol. 49 (265), 1954)
"In many cases general probability samples can be thought of in terms of (1) a subdivision of the population into strata, (2) a self-weighting probability sample in each stratum, and (3) combination of the stratum sample means weighted by the size of the stratum."
"Precision is expressed by an international standard, viz., the standard error. It measures the average of the difference between a complete coverage and a long series of estimates formed from samples drawn from this complete coverage by a particular procedure or drawing, and processed by a particular estimating formula." (W Edwards Deming, "On the Presentation of the Results of Sample Surveys as Legal Evidence", Journal of the American Statistical Association Vol 49 (268), 1954)
"The purely random sample is the only kind that can be examined with entire confidence by means of statistical theory, but there is one thing wrong with it. It is so difficult and expensive to obtain for many uses that sheer cost eliminates it." (Harold Hotelling, "How to Lie with Statistics", 1954)
No comments:
Post a Comment