What is p hat in statistics?

In statistics, p hat is a symbol used to represent the sample proportion. It is calculated by taking the number of "successes" in a sample (e.g. number of people who prefer a certain brand of soda) divided by the total number of observations in the sample.

P hat is used to estimate the true population proportion, denoted by the symbol p. It is often used in hypothesis testing and confidence interval calculations to make inferences about the population proportion based on the sample data.

The formula for calculating p hat is: p hat = (Number of successes) / (Total number of observations)

It is important to note that p hat is an estimate and may vary from sample to sample. The larger the sample size, the more reliable the estimate of the population proportion is likely to be.

In summary, p hat is a commonly used statistic in inferential statistics that represents the sample proportion and is used to make inferences about the population proportion.