Journal
FOLIA PARASITOLOGICA
Volume 64, Issue -, Pages -Publisher
FOLIA PARASITOLOGICA
DOI: 10.14411/fp.2017.025
Keywords
sampling bias; sample size; quantitative parasitology; aggregated distribution
Categories
Funding
- National Scientific Research Fund of Hungary (OTKA/NKFI) [108571]
- [GINOP-2.3.2-15-2016-00057]
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Former authors claimed that, due to parasites' aggregated distribution, small samples underestimate the true population mean abundance. Here we show that this claim is false or true, depending on what is meant by 'underestimate' or, mathematically speaking, how we define 'bias'. The 'how often' and 'on average' views lead to different conclusions because sample mean abundance itself exhibits an aggregated distribution: most often it falls slightly below the true population mean, while sometimes greatly exceeds it. Since the several small negative deviations are compensated by a few greater positive ones, the average of sample means approximates the true population mean.
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