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2.7.4 Basic properties of point estimates

We achieved three goals in this section. First, we determined that point estimates from a sample may be used to estimate population parameters. We also determined that these point estimates are not exact: they vary from one sample to another. Lastly, we quantified the uncertainty of the sample mean using what we call the standard error, mathematically represented in Equation (2.7). While we could also quantify the standard error for other estimates – such as the median, standard deviation, or any other number of statistics – we will postpone these extensions until later chapters or courses.