ELI5- In statistics, what do you mean by degree of freedom? And why do you lose a degree when moving from population to a sample?
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Think of degrees of freedom as a giant swath. Having more people in our swath means we have more room to be wrong, as one person in our swath has probably had a similar response. In a Population, we know what EVERY persons response is. In a sample, we don’t. Losing a degree of freedom accounts for that unknown.
Think about heights for a minute. What’s the average height of everyone in the world? Assuming we had a population, we know what every single individuals height is. However, we can’t know what every single persons height is, so we use samples. What if your sample has a lot of tall people? Short people? It skews your data. Losing a degree of freedom let’s us account for the unknown other heights
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