108 questions linked to/from How to understand degrees of freedom?
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### How to explain degrees of freedom term to a layman? [duplicate]

I just wanted to know how to explain "degrees of freedom" to a non-statistics person without mentioning any statistical terms. How to explain this?
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### Is there a difference between degrees of freedom and independent variables? [duplicate]

They seem to represent the same idea as far as I can tell - can they be used interchangeably?
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### What are “degrees of freedom”? [duplicate]

Possible Duplicate: How to understand degrees of freedom? I was at a talk a few months back where the speaker used the term 'degrees of freedom'. She briefly said something along the lines of it ...
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### Examples of degrees of freedom [duplicate]

The idea of degrees of freedom is pretty well sunk into my head, but I was wondering could someone perhaps give me few easy examples on how one would determine the number of degrees of freedom? For ...
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### Why does the mean have $n-1$ degrees of freedom? [duplicate]

When calculating the standard deviation of a set of measurements of $X$, you use the formula $$\sqrt{\frac{1}{n-1}\sum_{i=1}^n(x_i-\bar x)^2}$$ A common explanation I have found for the $n-1$ factor ...
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### What is Degrees of Freedom? [duplicate]

I have gone through tonnes of online resources (other stackexchange postings as well) and textbooks but still have not been able to grasp the concept. Most of them have vague explanations like "if you ...
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### Why degree of freedom in statistics is so useful? [duplicate]

Every statistic (a function of data, e.g., $\bar{X}$) has its own degree of freedom (DF). My question is: why often times, you want to estimate some parameter $\theta$ and you come up with some ...
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### Generalization of Bessel's correction to higher order models? [duplicate]

Multiplying sample variance (i.e. variance from sample mean) by $\frac{n}{n-1}$ to obtain an unbiased estimate of the population variance (i.e. variance from population mean) is called Bessel's ...
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### Why is degree of freedom so important? [duplicate]

As far as I'm concerned, the degree of freedom is simply the number of linear equations need to be satisfied. However, it seems closely related to the statistical deduction. For example Dividing by ...
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### Degrees of freedom clarification [duplicate]

I'm new to statistics, and so far I'm not grasping the significance of the concept of "degrees of freedom". So far, I've only had tangential exposure to it by way of calculating Student's t. When we ...
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### Degrees of freedom in covariance calculation [duplicate]

When calculating the sample covariance, why do we divide by $n-1$ instead of $n-2$? Don't we lose two degrees of freedom since we need to calculate two sample means? For example, when estimating the ...
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### Degrees of freedom for a model? [duplicate]

When I was reading a project paper, I came across this phrase: particularly if you have a lot of data and a model without many degrees of freedom. What is meant by a model without many degrees of ...
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### Are my data normal? chi-squared for goodness of fit [duplicate]

I have been tasked with determining if my observed data follow a normal distribution. With 119 observations (continuous data from -4 to 4), I was able to create a histogram with 25 bins, and upon ...
We say chi square with $n$ degrees of freedom. It reduces if different constraints are introduced. What is the concept behind degrees of freedom?