Biologist interested in the biology of sponges, octocorals, and their bacteria

less than 1 minute read

The law of large numbers explains why repeatedly sampling from a population is something we want to do. Assume we want to determine the sex-ratio of a population by sampling individuals and determining their sex as feminine or masculine. The sex-ratio represents the probability of finding a male or a female, depending on the code we assign to either sex, and can be modelled using a Bernoulli distribution. If we sample individuals repeatedly and start accumulating all the information to calculate the proportion of females (coded 1) sampled after N individuals have been evaluated, we will see that the obtained proportion will approach the true proportion as sample size grows.

I published code to visualize this using the R package ‘animation’ as a gist:

You will hopefully get an animated gif (i.e. Law_of_Large_Numbers.gif) looking like this:

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