[R-sig-teaching] About the standard gaussian distribution
David Monterde
dmonterde at me.com
Thu Apr 20 17:07:45 CEST 2017
First of all I have to apologize because my english is horrible.
I am working in a basic and practical statistic course.
I will speak about confidence intervals, of course.
But when I was preparing this chapter I had a doubt: I wonder if it has sence today to explain the confidence intervals for a mean in terms of the standard normal distribution.
If we show that the mean follows a normal distribution with variance/n then it is easy to explain (and to understand) that the confidence interval is due to two percentiles, the percentile alpha/2 and the percentile 1-alpha/2 from a normal distribution with the sample mean and the sample variance/n.
I think that the standard gaussian distribution was usefull when we had to calculate CI in the past.
That is, it was a simple way to have all possibilities in a single table (in paper).
But now, we have R functions that let us to obtain the exact values for any normal distribution.
I think that is not necessary to explain how to work with transformations if we can explain that a CI is simply to identify percentiles.
What do you think?
Thanks
PD I know that the normal distribution for CI need some hipothesis. But I have focused the question
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David Monterde
Lo difícil se hace.
Lo imposible se intenta.
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