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Statistics are used to describe the world.

The average height of women in the United States,


for example, is 63.8 inches. Statistics are also used to test our ideas. If your friend told you he
is 130 pounds, and you also know that 98 percent of healthy adult males weigh more than
this, you might have reason to be concerned about his health. This is because you would
expect few men sampled at random from the healthy population to weigh this little.
Many common statistical tests are possible because we can compare new observations to
expected patterns, as above. But what is the expected pattern? If our expectation is wrong, we
could reach incorrect conclusions.
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Many real-world observations can be approximated by, and tested against, the same expected
pattern: the normal distribution. In this familiar symmetric bell-shaped pattern, most
observations are close to average, and there are fewer observations further from the average.
The size of flowers, the physiological response to a drug, the breaking force in a batch of
steel cables these and other observations often fit a normal distribution.
There are, however, many important things we would like to measure and test that do not
follow a normal distribution. Household income doesnt high values are much further
from the average than low values are.
But even when raw data does not fit a normal distribution, there is often a normal distribution
lurking within it. This makes it possible to still use the normal distribution to test ideas about
non-normal data. This hidden normal distribution is revealed by collecting samples of
multiple observations, and calculating the average for each sample. As the number of
observations in each sample increases, the distribution of these averages becomes more and
more similar to the normal distribution. The existence of this hidden normal distribution is
known as the Central Limit Theorem.

Animator Shuyi Chiou and the folks at CreatureCast give an adorable introduction to the
central limit theorem an important concept in probability theory that can reveal normal
distributions (i.e. bell curves) across data that does not appear to fit a normal distribution
curve.
Via The New York Times:
Many real-world observations can be approximated by, and tested against, the same expected
pattern: the normal distribution. In this familiar symmetric bell-shaped pattern, most
observations are close to average, and there are fewer observations further from the average.
The size of flowers, the physiological response to a drug, the breaking force in a batch of
steel cables these and other observations often fit a normal distribution.
There are, however, many important things we would like to measure and test that do not
follow a normal distribution. Household income doesnt high values are much further
from the average than low values are.
But even when raw data does not fit a normal distribution, there is often a normal distribution
lurking within it. This makes it possible to still use the normal distribution to test ideas about
non-normal data. This hidden normal distribution is revealed by collecting samples of
multiple observations, and calculating the average for each sample. As the number of
observations in each sample increases, the distribution of these averages becomes more and
more similar to the normal distribution. The existence of this hidden normal distribution is
known as the Central Limit Theorem.

Statistics are used to describe the world. In this video using bunnies and dragons as an
example to explain about Central Limit Theorem.
The average of samples have approximately normal distributions.
Sample -------> Bigger
Distribution of average ----- more normal and narrower
Some data sets follow a normal distribution. Others do not. However for both normal and
non-normal data, if we repeatedly take independent random samples of size n from a
population, then when n is large, the distribution of the sample means will approach a
normal distribution.
We can used a normal distribution to test studies about the world even when the underlined
variable dont follow a normal distribution.

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