I keep trying to figure it out, but every resource I find uses the same wording
In: Mathematics
A population is the group of people you’re taking a sample from. For example, if I wanted a simple random sample for an experiment of 25 women in missouri, the population would be ALL the women in missouri. Not the number of women, but literally just the concept of all the women in missouri. If my experiment used a sample of 170 Americans, then my population would be all Americans. It basically is just talking about who you can generalize the statistics to when you’re drawing conclusions.
Seed has less to do with sampling and more with just random number generation. One of the ways you can draw a random sample from the population is by using a computer to generate a list of random numbers. But the way that computers work makes it so that they are literally incapable of coming up with a random number. Instead, they have like a database with a long list of numbers that it uses to generate a random number. The seed tells it where in the list to start looking for the first number. Think of it like when you give a computer the seed 301, it will start on the 301st number and start listing from there.
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