R: Data Analysis and Visualization
by Tony Fischetti, Brett Lantz, Jaynal Abedin, Hrishi V. Mittal, Bater Makhabel, Edina Berlinger, Ferenc Illés, Milán Badics, Ádám Banai, Gergely Daróczi, Barbara Dömötör, Gergely Gabler, Dániel Havran, Péter Juhász, István Margitai, Balázs Márkus, Péter Medvegyev, Julia Molnár, Balázs Árpád Szucs, Ágnes Tuza, Tamás Vadász, Kata Váradi, Ágnes Vidovics-Dancs
Smaller samples
Remember when I said that the sampling distribution of sample means is approximately normal for a large enough sample size? This caveat means that for smaller sample sizes (usually considered to be below 30), the sampling distribution of the sample means is not well approximated by a normal distribution. It is, however, well approximated by another distribution: the t-distribution.
Note
A bit of history…
The t-distribution is also known as the Student's t-distribution. It gets its name from the 1908 paper that introduces it, by William Sealy Gosset writing under the pen name Student. Gosset worked as a statistician at the Guinness Brewery and used the t-distribution and the related t-test to study small samples of the quality of the ...
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