Timeline for How well does the normal distribution perform?
Current License: CC BY-SA 3.0
8 events
| when toggle format | what | by | license | comment | |
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| May 1, 2012 at 8:29 | vote | accept | mfc | ||
| May 1, 2012 at 8:29 | vote | accept | mfc | ||
| May 1, 2012 at 8:29 | |||||
| May 1, 2012 at 3:24 | comment | added | Néstor | It is in general, but I believe it is not in the case of the heights. There are pretty well established physical limits for the high and low limits of $h$ of a human being (i.e. how high can a human being be without stressing the body). In any case, you can always put extreme physical values (i.e. a human can't be smaller than an atom and can't be higher than the radius of the Earth), and the result would still be pretty much a gaussian. It all goes down to your knowledge on the physical constraints on your problem. | |
| May 1, 2012 at 3:09 | comment | added | mfc | Bayes theorem brings up a whole set of other questions as you have to make assumptions about the high and the low. If you don't have data for the entire population, wouldn't it be unsafe to make any hard assumptions about what the limits are? | |
| May 1, 2012 at 2:50 | history | edited | Néstor | CC BY-SA 3.0 |
added 176 characters in body
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| May 1, 2012 at 2:48 | comment | added | Néstor | I edited it :-). I realized that the link wasn't clear. | |
| May 1, 2012 at 2:48 | comment | added | Macro | Can you explain the relevance of this discussion to the original question? | |
| May 1, 2012 at 2:43 | history | answered | Néstor | CC BY-SA 3.0 |