Sampling distribution of the proportion

Preliminaries

•  We are interested in determining the proportion of all items that possess a
particular attribute.
• The best estimate of this population proportion will be the sample proportion.
• However any inference about how close the estimate is to the true proportion
value will be based on the distribution of this sample proportion whose
underlying distribution is binomial.
• But if the sample size is large enough such that then normal distribution is a
reasonable approximation to the discrete binomial distribution.
• Why?
Preliminaries

•  Recall that where x is the sum of random variables (xi) whose values are 0 or 1.
• Thus . Therefore, is really just a sample mean.
• Each of the xi can be thought of as binomial random variable with sample size n =
1.
• Thus, they each have a mean of and
• Now using CLT, the sample mean has an expected value and the variance .
• Therefore, the sample proportion has an expected value of and a variance of .