ELI5: Explain Like I'm 5

Statistical sampling

Statistical sampling is like getting a taste of something before you eat the whole thing. Imagine you have a big cookie jar full of cookies, but you don’t know if all the cookies taste good. Instead of trying every single cookie, you can just take a few cookies out of the jar to try. If the cookies you try taste good, it's likely that the rest of the cookies in the jar taste good too. This is called statistical sampling.

Statistical sampling is when we pick a sample of things from a larger group to try and learn about the whole group. This is useful when we want to make decisions about the big group but don't have the time or resources to look at every one of them.

For example, imagine you’re a teacher and you want to know how your whole class is doing in math. If you give every student a test and grade them, it would take a really long time and be a lot of work. Instead, you can just choose some students to take the test and use their scores to make a prediction about how the rest of the class would do. This is called sampling.

When we do statistical sampling, there are some important things we need to think about. We need to make sure the sample is random, which means we don't choose people or things based on any particular trait or characteristic. We also need to make sure the sample size is big enough to represent the whole group accurately.

So, in summary, statistical sampling is like taking a small bite of something to see if you will like the whole thing, and it helps us get a good idea of what a larger group is like without having to examine every individual member.