Re: Standard deviation and average
- From: "Anon." <bob.ohara@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>
- Date: Fri, 25 Aug 2006 17:03:09 +0300
shunya@xxxxxxxx wrote:
and when is mean itself a good description of a sample of a data?
what if the distribution of data seems like a normal distribution with
one hand and leg gone?
I understand that confidence intervals assume "normality" of
measurement and also
measurement errors?.
No, you can calculate confience intervals for any distribution.
There are distributions for which the mean is a poor summary (e.g. samples from a Cauchy distribution), and learning which summaries are good in which situations is one of those things that you pick up with experience. e.g. the mean cam be poor for a distribution with one thick tail, because it's heavily influenced by outliers. Fortunately there are other statistics that can be used (e.g. mode, median, trimmed means, winzorised means etc.).
Ha! If things were simple, we statisticians would be out of jobs. :-)
Bob
--
Bob O'Hara
Dept. of Mathematics and Statistics
P.O. Box 68 (Gustaf Hällströmin katu 2b)
FIN-00014 University of Helsinki
Finland
Telephone: +358-9-191 51479
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WWW: http://www.RNI.Helsinki.FI/~boh/
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