ELI5: Explain Like I'm 5

Statistical ensemble

Okay kiddo, so imagine we had a big bag of Skittles candy. Each Skittle is like a little unit, and we can count how many red ones, blue ones, green ones, etc. there are.

Now, imagine we want to talk about all the different ways that we could pick out a handful of Skittles from the bag. We could choose different numbers of Skittles, and maybe sometimes we'd get a bunch of one color, and sometimes we'd get a mix of colors.

This idea of talking about all the possible ways that we could choose a group of things is kind of like an "ensemble" in statistics. We're not just looking at one specific example, but sort of imagining all of the possibilities that could happen.

So in this "Skittle ensemble", we might say things like "on average, if we picked out 10 Skittles, we'd expect to get 3 red ones, 2 blue ones, 4 green ones, and 1 yellow one." That's like making a prediction based on what we know about the different colors and the fact that we're randomly choosing from the bag.

Does that make sense, kiddo?