Abstract
The normal distribution is probably the most widely studied distribution in statistics because :
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(a)
Distributions which are approximately normal are frequently encountered, e.g. most sets of random errors follow the normal distribution.
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(b)
The normal distribution is important as a ‘limiting distribution’, i.e. it can be used as an approximation to other distributions (see sections 8.7 and 8.8).
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(c)
The normal distribution is easy to use.
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(d)
It has been shown that the results obtained by assuming a non-normal population to be normally distributed are reasonably accurate when the departure from normality is not too severe.
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(e)
The central limit theorem shows that the means of samples of size n from any population are approximately normally distributed. The approximation improves as n gets bigger.
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© 1968 Springer Science+Business Media New York
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Mulholland, H., Jones, C.R. (1968). The Normal Distribution. In: Fundamentals of Statistics. Springer, Boston, MA. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4899-6507-3_8
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4899-6507-3_8
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