Chapter 12
What’s Normal? Recognizing Normally-Shaped Variation
In This Chapter
Understanding the pervasiveness of bell-shaped, normally-distributed data
Calculating probabilities by using the standard normal model
Transforming real-world data to the standard normal model
Verifying that your data are normal (or close enough)
Most data distributions you encounter have what’s called normally-shaped variation. And many of the statistical tools of Six Sigma we describe throughout this book assume a normal distribution. So before you dive into using the Six Sigma toolkit, you first need to know what normal variation is, what it looks like, and how to gauge how close your data are to the normal ideal.
Another important topic — describing or summarizing the probability of past events and forecasting or predicting the probability of future ones — is related to this idea of normally-shaped variation. Successful Six Sigma practitioners know how to check their data for normally-shaped variation. This chapter gets you to the heart of the proper technical foundation of the statistical tools and ...
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