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Standard deviation can also be used to calculate standard ... with each value having ... Particle physics conventionally uses a standard of "5 sigma" for the ...
In the empirical sciences, the so-called three-sigma rule of thumb (or 3 σ rule) expresses a conventional heuristic that nearly all values are taken to lie within three standard deviations of the mean, and thus it is empirically useful to treat 99.7% probability as near certainty.
The standard deviation of the distribution is (sigma). A random variable with a Gaussian distribution is said to be normally distributed , and is called a normal deviate . Normal distributions are important in statistics and are often used in the natural and social sciences to represent real-valued random variables whose distributions are not ...
The coefficient of variation is useful because the standard deviation of data must always be understood in the context of the mean of the data. In contrast, the actual value of the CV is independent of the unit in which the measurement has been taken, so it is a dimensionless number. For comparison between data sets with different units or ...
Another generalization of variance for vector-valued random variables , which results in a scalar value rather than in a matrix, is the generalized variance (), the determinant of the covariance matrix. The generalized variance can be shown to be related to the multidimensional scatter of points around their mean.
In many practical applications, the true value of σ is unknown. As a result, we need to use a distribution that takes into account that spread of possible σ' s. When the true underlying distribution is known to be Gaussian, although with unknown σ, then the resulting estimated distribution follows the Student t-distribution.
For example, the 68% confidence limits for a one-dimensional variable belonging to a normal distribution are approximately ± one standard deviation σ from the central value x, which means that the region x ± σ will cover the true value in roughly 68% of cases. If the uncertainties are correlated then covariance must be taken into account ...
In a distribution, full width at half maximum (FWHM) is the difference between the two values of the independent variable at which the dependent variable is equal to half of its maximum value. In other words, it is the width of a spectrum curve measured between those points on the y -axis which are half the maximum amplitude.