Normal Distribution

This is a continuous Symmetric, unimodal bell-shaped Distribution

  • it has two parameters: mean $\mu$ and std $\sigma$, denoted as $N(\mu, \sigma)$
  • Standard Normal Distribution is $N(\mu = 0, \sigma = 1)$


Probability Density Function

x = seq(from=-3, to=3, length=15)
normalDensity = dnorm(x, mean=0, sd=1)
r = round(normalDensity, 2)
bp = barplot(r)
xspline(x=bp, y=r, lwd=2, shape=1, border="blue")
text(x=bp, y=r+0.03, labels=as.character(r), xpd=TRUE, cex=0.7)

Code [1] [2]

2264f48471de4f249b0db00035fd3261.png



Z-score

68-95-99.7 rule

Also referred as the "rule of 3 sigmas"

  • most of the data lay within 3 $\sigma$s from $\mu$
  • normal-3-sigmas.png


$Z$-score

$Z$-score of an observation is the number of standard deviations for the mean

  • 1 sdt above - $z = +1$
  • 1.5 std below - $z = -1.5$
  • $z = \cfrac{x - \mu}{\sigma}$


we can use $z$-scores to identify unusual observations

  • $x_1$ is more unusual than $x_2$ if $| z_1 | > | z_2 |$


$Z$-standardization

  • so $Z$-scores are used to standardize the observations
  • in effect, it normalizes any normal distribution $N(\mu, \sigma$) to $N(0, 1)$
  • see Normalization


Percentile

Example:

  • Scores of SAT takers are distributed normally
  • parameters: $\mu = 1500, \sigma = 300$
  • Ann earned 1800 on SAT,
  • so Ann's $z = 1$


Ann's percentile - percent of people who earned lower SAT score

  • normal-ex-percentile.png
  • shaded - individuals who scored below Ann
  • so knowing the $z$-score we can calculate the percentile
    • Ann is the 84th percentile of SAT takers
  • and vise-versa: we can also find $z$-score for given percentile


Example 2

  • Shannon is a randomly selected SAT-taker.
  • What's the probability that she'll score 1630 or more?
  • Can find the $z$-score for that - it's $z = \cfrac{x - \mu}{\sigma} = 0.43$
  • so we calculate the percentiles
    • probability of getting below $z=0.43$ is 2/3
    • so probability of getting above $z=0.43$ is 1 - 2/3 = 1/3


Always draw the bell shape first and then shade the area of interest


$Z$-scores for Inferential Statistics

it may be useful for


Normal Approximation

Many processes can be approximated well by normal distribution

  • e.g. SAT, height of USA males, etc

But need to check if it's reasonable to use the normal approximation

2 visual methods for checking the assumption of normality

  1. simple histogram + best fit of normal shape
    • dd4cdabcdf864de594a2d46d760ee067.png
  2. Q-Q Plot (or Normal Probability Plot)
    • normal-prob-plot-ex.png


Code to produce the first figure:

load(url("http://www.openintro.org/stat/data/bdims.RData"))
fdims = subset(bdims, bdims$sex == 0)
hist(fdims$hgt, probability=TRUE, ylim=c(0, 0.07))
x = 140:190
y = dnorm(x=x, mean=mean(fdims$hgt), sd=sd(fdims$hgt))
lines(x=x, y=y, col="blue")


Code to produce Q-Q Plots

qqnorm(fdims$hgt, col="orange", pch=19)
qqline(fdims$hgt, lwd=2)


Sources