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Analyze a population using data samples

Analyze a population using data samples - Microsoft Excel Tutorial

From the course: Learning Excel: Data Analysis

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Analyze a population using data samples

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- [Instructor] When you gather data about your business, you will often analyze samples instead of an entire data set, and that's because gathering data can be very expensive, both in terms of money and time. That said, you should gather as large a sample as you can, interview as many customers, review as many products to make sure that you have all the data that you need. More is better. From there you can estimate the data population's standard deviation based on that sample, and then you determine your desired confidence level. Do you want to be 90% confident in your result? Do you want to be 95% confident, 98, 99? It all depends on how precise you want to be. From there, you can calculate your margin of error and that will tell you at your given confidence level how much above or below your values will be. So what is margin of error? Well, let's say that each bottle contains 12 ounces of olive oil with a margin of error of plus or minus 0.3 ounces at a 95% level of confidence. So…

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