Section author: Danielle J. Navarro and David R. Foxcroft

Sampling distributions and the central limit theorem

The law of large numbers is a very powerful tool but it’s not going to be good enough to answer all our questions. Among other things, all it gives us is a “long run guarantee”. In the long run, if we were somehow able to collect an infinite amount of data, then the law of large numbers guarantees that our sample statistics will be correct. But as John Maynard Keynes famously argued in economics, a long run guarantee is of little use in real life.

[The] long run is a misleading guide to current affairs. In the long run we are all dead. Economists set themselves too easy, too useless a task, if in tempestuous seasons they can only tell us, that when the storm is long past, the ocean is flat again (Keynes, 1923).

As in economics, so too in psychology and statistics. It is not enough to know that we will eventually arrive at the right answer when calculating the sample mean. Knowing that an infinitely large data set will tell me the exact value of the population mean is cold comfort when my actual data set has a sample size of N = 100. In real life, then, we must know something about the behaviour of the sample mean when it is calculated from a more modest data set!

Sampling distribution of the mean

With this in mind, let’s abandon the idea that our studies will have sample sizes of 10,000 and consider instead a very modest experiment indeed. This time around we’ll sample N = 5 people and measure their IQ scores. As before, I can simulate this experiment in jamovi = NORM(100,15) function, but I only need 5 participant IDs this time, not 10,000. These are the five numbers that jamovi generated:

90 82 94 99 110

The mean IQ in this sample turns out to be exactly 95. Not surprisingly, this is much less accurate than the previous experiment. Now imagine that I decided to replicate the experiment. That is, I repeat the procedure as closely as possible and I randomly sample 5 new people and measure their IQ. Again, jamovi allows me to simulate the results of this procedure, and generates these five numbers:

78 88 111 111 117

This time around, the mean IQ in my sample is 101. If I repeat the experiment 10 times I obtain the results shown in Table 8, and as you can see the sample mean varies from one replication to the next.

Table 8 Ten replications of the IQ experiment, each with a sample size of N =5
  Person 1 Person 2 Person 3 Person 4 Person 5 Sample Mean
Replication 1 90 82 94 99 110 95.0
Replication 2 78 88 111 111 117 101.0
Replication 3 111 122 91 98 86 101.6
Replication 4 98 96 119 99 107 103.8
Replication 5 105 113 103 103 98 104.4
Replication 6 81 89 93 85 114 92.4
Replication 7 100 93 108 98 133 106.4
Replication 8 107 100 105 117 85 102.8
Replication 9 86 119 108 73 116 100.4
Replication 10 95 126 112 120 76 105.8

Now suppose that I decided to keep going in this fashion, replicating this “five IQ scores” experiment over and over again. Every time I replicate the experiment I write down the sample mean. Over time, I’d be amassing a new data set, in which every experiment generates a single data point. The first 10 observations from my data set are the sample means listed in Table 8, so my data set starts out like this:

95.0 101.0 101.6 103.8 104.4 …

What if I continued like this for 10,000 replications, and then drew a histogram. Well that’s exactly what I did, and you can see the results in Fig. 60. As this picture illustrates, the average of 5 IQ scores is usually between 90 and 110. But more importantly, what it highlights is that if we replicate an experiment over and over again, what we end up with is a distribution of sample means! This distribution has a special name in statistics, it’s called the sampling distribution of the mean.

Sampling distribution: Mean for the “five IQ scores experiment”

Fig. 60 The sampling distribution of the mean for the “five IQ scores experiment”: If you sample 5 people at random and calculate their average IQ you’ll almost certainly get a number between 80 and 120, even though there are quite a lot of individuals who have IQs above 120 or below 80. For comparison, the black line plots the population distribution of IQ scores.

Sampling distributions are another important theoretical idea in statistics, and they’re crucial for understanding the behaviour of small samples. For instance, when I ran the very first “five IQ scores” experiment, the sample mean turned out to be 95. What the sampling distribution in Fig. 60 tells us, though, is that the “five IQ scores” experiment is not very accurate. If I repeat the experiment, the sampling distribution tells me that I can expect to see a sample mean anywhere between 80 and 120.

Sampling distributions exist for any sample statistic!

One thing to keep in mind when thinking about sampling distributions is that any sample statistic you might care to calculate has a sampling distribution. For example, suppose that each time I replicated the “five IQ scores” experiment I wrote down the largest IQ score in the experiment. This would give me a data set that started out like this:

110 117 122 119 113 …

Doing this over and over again would give me a very different sampling distribution, namely the sampling distribution of the maximum. The sampling distribution of the maximum of 5 IQ scores is shown in Fig. 61. Not surprisingly, if you pick 5 people at random and then find the person with the highest IQ score, they’re going to have an above average IQ. Most of the time you’ll end up with someone whose IQ is measured in the 100 to 140 range.

Sampling distribution: Maximum for the “five IQ scores experiment”

Fig. 61 The sampling distribution of the maximum for the “five IQ scores experiment”: If you sample 5 people at random and select the one with the highest IQ score you’ll probably see someone with an IQ between 100 and 140.

The central limit theorem

At this point I hope you have a pretty good sense of what sampling distributions are, and in particular what the sampling distribution of the mean is. In this section I want to talk about how the sampling distribution of the mean changes as a function of sample size. Intuitively, you already know part of the answer. If you only have a few observations, the sample mean is likely to be quite inaccurate. If you replicate a small experiment and recalculate the mean you’ll get a very different answer. In other words, the sampling distribution is quite wide. If you replicate a large experiment and recalculate the sample mean you’ll probably get the same answer you got last time, so the sampling distribution will be very narrow. You can see this visually in Fig. 62, showing that the bigger the sample size, the narrower the sampling distribution gets. We can quantify this effect by calculating the standard deviation of the sampling distribution, which is referred to as the standard error. The standard error of a statistic is often denoted SE, and since we’re usually interested in the standard error of the sample mean, we often use the acronym SEM. As you can see just by looking at the picture, as the sample size N increases, the SEM decreases.

Shape of the sampling distribution in dependence of the sample size

Fig. 62 Illustration of the how sampling distribution of the mean depends on sample size. In each panel I generated 10,000 samples of IQ data and calculated the mean IQ observed within each of these data sets. The histograms in these plots show the distribution of these means (i.e., the sampling distribution of the mean). Each individual IQ score was drawn from a normal distribution with mean 100 and standard deviation 15, which is shown as the solid black line. In the left panel, each data set contained only a single observation, so the mean of each sample is just one person’s IQ score. As a consequence, the sampling distribution of the mean is of course identical to the population distribution of IQ scores. However, when we raise the sample size to 2 (middle panel) the mean of any one sample tends to be closer to the population mean than a one person’s IQ score, and so the histogram (i.e., the sampling distribution) is a bit narrower than the population distribution. By the time we raise the sample size to 10 (right panel), we can see that the distribution of sample means tend to be fairly tightly clustered around the true population mean.

Okay, so that’s one part of the story. However, there’s something I’ve been glossing over so far. All my examples up to this point have been based on the “IQ scores” experiments, and because IQ scores are roughly normally distributed I’ve assumed that the population distribution is normal. What if it isn’t normal? What happens to the sampling distribution of the mean? The remarkable thing is this, no matter what shape your population distribution is, as N increases the sampling distribution of the mean starts to look more like a normal distribution. To give you a sense of this I ran some simulations. To do this, I started with the “ramped” distribution shown in the histogram in Fig. 63 (top-left panel). As you can see by comparing the triangular shaped histogram to the bell curve plotted by the black line, the population distribution doesn’t look very much like a normal distribution at all. Next, I simulated the results of a large number of experiments. In each experiment I took N = 2 samples from this distribution, and then calculated the sample mean. Fig. 63 (top-right panel) plots the histogram of these sample means (i.e., the sampling distribution of the mean for N = 2). This time, the histogram produces a ∩-shaped distribution. It’s still not normal, but it’s a lot closer to the black line than the population distribution in Fig. 63 (top-left panel). When I increase the sample size to N = 4, the sampling distribution of the mean is very close to normal (Fig. 63, bottom-left panel), and by the time we reach a sample size of N = 8 (Fig. 63; bottom- right panel) it’s almost perfectly normal. In other words, as long as your sample size isn’t tiny, the sampling distribution of the mean will be approximately normal no matter what your population distribution looks like!

Demonstration of the central limit theorem

Fig. 63 Demonstration of the central limit theorem: In the top-left panel, we have a non-normal population distribution, and the remaining panels show the sampling distribution of the mean for samples of size 2 (top-right), 4 (bottom-left) and 8 (bottom-right) for data drawn from the distribution in the top-left panel. As you can see, even though the original population distribution is non-normal the sampling distribution of the mean becomes pretty close to normal by the time you have a sample of even 4 observations.

On the basis of these figures, it seems like we have evidence for all of the following claims about the sampling distribution of the mean.

  • The mean of the sampling distribution is the same as the mean of the population
  • The standard deviation of the sampling distribution (i.e., the standard error) gets smaller as the sample size increases
  • The shape of the sampling distribution becomes normal as the sample size increases

As it happens, not only are all of these statements true, there is a very famous theorem in statistics that proves all three of them, known as the central limit theorem. Among other things, the central limit theorem tells us that if the population distribution has mean µ and standard deviation σ, then the sampling distribution of the mean also has mean µ and the standard error of the mean is

\[\mbox{SEM} = \frac{\sigma}{ \sqrt{N} }\]

Because we divide the population standard deviation σ by the square root of the sample size N, the SEM gets smaller as the sample size increases. It also tells us that the shape of the sampling distribution becomes normal.[1]

This result is useful for all sorts of things. It tells us why large experiments are more reliable than small ones, and because it gives us an explicit formula for the standard error it tells us how much more reliable a large experiment is. It tells us why the normal distribution is, well, normal. In real experiments, many of the things that we want to measure are actually averages of lots of different quantities (e.g., arguably, “general” intelligence as measured by IQ is an average of a large number of “specific” skills and abilities), and when that happens, the averaged quantity should follow a normal distribution. Because of this mathematical law, the normal distribution pops up over and over again in real data.


[1]As usual, I’m being a bit sloppy here. The central limit theorem is a bit more general than this section implies. Like most introductory stats texts I’ve discussed one situation where the central limit theorem holds: when you’re taking an average across lots of independent events drawn from the same distribution. However, the central limit theorem is much broader than this. There’s a whole class of things called “U-statistics” for instance, all of which satisfy the central limit theorem and therefore become normally distributed for large sample sizes. The mean is one such statistic, but it’s not the only one.