Sampling distribution

In statistics, a sampling distribution or finite-sample distribution is the probability distribution of a given random-sample-based statistic. For an arbitrarily large number of samples where each sample, involving multiple observations (data points), is separately used to compute one value of a statistic (for example, the sample mean or sample variance) per sample, the sampling distribution is the probability distribution of the values that the statistic takes on. In many contexts, only one sample (i.e., a set of observations) is observed, but the sampling distribution can be found theoretically.

Sampling distributions are important in statistics because they provide a major simplification en route to statistical inference. More specifically, they allow analytical considerations to be based on the probability distribution of a statistic, rather than on the joint probability distribution of all the individual sample values.