July 2025
Beginner
464 pages
9h 31m
English
Content preview from Statistical Analysis with R For Dummies, 2nd Edition
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Chapter 8
What’s Normal?
IN THIS CHAPTER
Meeting the normal distribution family
Working with standard deviations and the normal distribution
Understanding R’s normal distribution functions
One of the main jobs of a statistician is to estimate characteristics of a population. The job becomes easier if the statistician can make some assumptions about the populations they study.
Here’s an assumption that works over and over again: A specific attribute, ability, or trait is distributed throughout a population so that (1) most people have an average or near-average amount of the attribute and (2) progressively fewer people have increasingly extreme amounts of the attribute. In this chapter, I discuss this assumption and its implications for statistics. I also discuss R functions related to this assumption.
Hitting the Curve
Attributes in the physical world, like length or weight, are all about objects you can see and touch. It’s not that easy in the world of social scientists, statisticians, market researchers, and businesspeople. They have to be creative when they measure traits they can’t put their hands around — like intelligence, musical ability, or willingness to buy a new product. ...
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I'm always learning. So when I got on to O'Reilly, I was like a kid in a candy store. There are playlists. There are answers. There's on-demand training. It's worth its weight in gold, in terms of what it allows me to do.