With few members at the high and low ends and many in the middle.īecause they occur so frequently, there is an unfortunate tendency to invoke normal distributions in situations where they may not be applicable. Many commonĪttributes such as test scores, height, etc., follow roughly normal distributions, Variance tends to the normal distribution. Of variates with any distribution having a finite mean and This theorem states that the mean of any set
To a surprising result known as the central limit
Normal distributions have many convenient properties, so random variates with unknown distributions are often assumed to be normal, especially in physics and astronomy.Īlthough this can be a dangerous assumption, it is often a good approximation due Where erf is the so-called error function.
