In statistics, point estimation involves the use of sample data to calculate a single value (known as a statistic) which is to serve as a "best guess" or "best estimate" of an unknown (fixed or random) population parameter.
More formally, it is the application of a point estimator to the data.
In general, point estimation should be contrasted with interval estimation: such interval estimates are typically either confidence intervals in the case of frequentist inference, or credible intervals in the case of Bayesian inference.
Read more about Point Estimation: Point Estimators, Bayesian Point-estimation, Properties of Point Estimates
Famous quotes containing the words point and/or estimation:
“And William had dudgeon for the sightless beadle
Who worshipped a God like a grandmother on ice-skates,
For William saw two angels on the point of a needle
As nobody since except W. B. Yeats.”
—Allen Tate (1899–1979)
“No man ever stood lower in my estimation for having a patch in his clothes; yet I am sure that there is greater anxiety, commonly, to have fashionable, or at least clean and unpatched clothes, than to have a sound conscience.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)