High Quality Content by WIKIPEDIA articles! A statistical parameter is a parameter that indexes a family of probability distributions. It can be regarded as a numerical characteristic of a population or a model. Among parameterized families of distributions are the normal distributions, the Poisson distributions, the binomial distributions, and the exponential distributions. The family of normal distributions has two parameters, the mean and the variance: if these are specified, the distribution is known exactly. The family of chi-squared distributions, on the other hand, has only one parameter, the number of degrees of freedom.