QBIO 305 Statistics for the Life Sciences

These flashcards cover key terms and concepts from the QBIO 305 Statistics for the Life Sciences course, providing definitions to help with exam preparation.

Central Limit Theorem

States that as the sample size increases, the distribution of the sample mean approaches a normal distribution, regardless of the shape of the population distribution.

Standard Deviation (SD)

A measure of the amount of variation or dispersion of a set of values.

Standard Error (SE)

The standard deviation of the sampling distribution of a statistic, usually the mean. It reflects how much the sample mean will vary from the true population mean.

Confidence Interval

A range of values derived from the sample that is likely to contain the population parameter with a specified level of confidence.

Degrees of Freedom (df)

A value used in various statistical tests that is based on the number of independent observations in a sample minus the number of parameters estimated from the data.

Student's t Distribution

A type of probability distribution that is symmetric and bell-shaped, like the normal distribution, but has heavier tails. It is used when estimating population parameters when the sample size is small, and the population standard deviation is unknown.

Population Mean (µ)

The average of a set of values in an entire population.

Sample Mean (ȳ)

The average of a set of values from a sample taken from the population.

Sampling Distribution

The probability distribution of a statistic (such as the sample mean) obtained from a large number of samples drawn from a specific population.

P-value

The probability of observing a test statistic at least as extreme as the one computed from the sample data, under the assumption that the null hypothesis is true.