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In statistics, the 68–95–99.7 rule, also known as the empirical rule, and sometimes abbreviated 3sr or 3 σ, is a shorthand used to remember the percentage of values that lie within an interval estimate in a normal distribution: approximately 68%, 95%, and 99.7% of the values lie within one, two, and three standard deviations of the mean ...
For instance, if estimating the effect of a drug on blood pressure with a 95% confidence interval that is six units wide, and the known standard deviation of blood pressure in the population is 15, the required sample size would be =, which would be rounded up to 97, since sample sizes must be integers and must meet or exceed the calculated ...
For a confidence level, there is a corresponding confidence interval about the mean , that is, the interval [, +] within which values of should fall with probability . Precise values of z γ {\displaystyle z_{\gamma }} are given by the quantile function of the normal distribution (which the 68–95–99.7 rule approximates).
For example, f(x) might be the proportion of people of a particular age x who support a given candidate in an election. If x is measured at the precision of a single year, we can construct a separate 95% confidence interval for each age. Each of these confidence intervals covers the corresponding true value f(x) with confidence 0.
The colored lines are 50% confidence intervals for the mean, μ. At the center of each interval is the sample mean, marked with a diamond. The blue intervals contain the population mean, and the red ones do not. In statistics, a confidence interval (CI) is a tool for estimating a parameter, such as the mean of a population. [1]
Given a sample from a normal distribution, whose parameters are unknown, it is possible to give prediction intervals in the frequentist sense, i.e., an interval [a, b] based on statistics of the sample such that on repeated experiments, X n+1 falls in the interval the desired percentage of the time; one may call these "predictive confidence intervals".
About 68% of values drawn from a normal distribution are within one standard deviation σ from the mean; about 95% of the values lie within two standard deviations; and about 99.7% are within three standard deviations. [8] This fact is known as the 68–95–99.7 (empirical) rule, or the 3-sigma rule.
Because of the central limit theorem, this number is used in the construction of approximate 95% confidence intervals. Its ubiquity is due to the arbitrary but common convention of using confidence intervals with 95% probability in science and frequentist statistics, though other probabilities (90%, 99%, etc.) are sometimes used.