In statistics, a sample is a smaller group or subset that is selected from the population of interest. It's a subset of the population that is used to represent the entire group as a whole. For example, if the population is all people living in a city, a sample might be 1,000 individuals selected randomly from that city.

In cluster analysis, a cluster is a group of similar data points. The goal of cluster analysis is to group, or cluster, observations that are similar to each other.

The width of the confidence interval increases as the variability in the sample increases. Greater variability leads to a larger standard error, which in turn leads to wider confidence intervals.

Overfitting in polynomial regression means that the model fits the training data too closely, capturing not only the underlying pattern but also the noise. As a result, the model will perform well on the training data but poorly on new, unseen data. This is because the model has essentially 'memorized' the training data and fails to generalize well to new situations.

Violating the assumption of homoscedasticity (constant variance of the errors) can lead to inefficient and invalid standard errors, which can result in incorrect inferences about the regression coefficients. The regression coefficients themselves remain unbiased.

The null hypothesis is the status quo or the statement of no effect or no difference, which is assumed to be true until evidence suggests otherwise.

The Variance Inflation Factor (VIF) assumes a linear relationship between the predictor variables. This is because VIF is derived from the R-squared value of the regression of one predictor on all the others.

The F-statistic in the context of a multiple linear regression model is used to test the overall significance of the model. The null hypothesis is that all of the regression coefficients are equal to zero, against the alternative that at least one does not.

Overfitting in polynomial regression can be addressed by using regularization techniques, such as Ridge or Lasso, which add a penalty term to the loss function to constrain the magnitude of the coefficients, resulting in a simpler model. Other strategies can include reducing the degree of the polynomial or using cross-validation to tune the complexity of the model.

Non-parametric statistical methods are most useful when the data does not meet the assumptions for parametric methods. For example, if the data does not follow a normal distribution, or if there are concerns about outliers or skewness, non-parametric methods may be appropriate.