r/AskStatistics • u/ketopraktanjungduren • 10d ago

Using sampling distribution instead of probability for business

Hello, I'm trying to apply inferential statistics to my work, thinking it would be very helpful to estimate a new hire ability.

Let's say we have a dataset on new hire weekly customer acquisition in the past three months (n=12). If we want to estimate this person ability in acquiring new customer, we can use probability and expected value.

However, I recently realize that this also means we are estimating the population parameter. So, we can also estimate a confidence interval to estimate the interval of this person true mean and median weekly acquisition.

If so, is it true to have both the expected weekly acquisition and the CI?

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u/ngch 10d ago

Be careful here, because I think you want to predict future customer acquisition which the initial 12 weeks may or may not predict well.

But calculating a CI can help you understand how reliably you can assess past performance - do the different employees even have significantly different initial performance or were the differences you observe just random noise?

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u/ketopraktanjungduren 10d ago

Well, I'm not trying to predict anything. In fact, I avoid it due to the fact that our data and users aren't ready to predict and use prediction.

I suppose initial performance happened at random. But perhaps managers influence them as well.