From the course: Excel Statistics Essential Training: 1

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Empirical rule

Empirical rule - Microsoft Excel Tutorial

From the course: Excel Statistics Essential Training: 1

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Empirical rule

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- [Instructor] As was discussed earlier in this course, the normal distribution, it pops up in all sorts of ways in nature; heights, weights, test scores, blood pressure. In those types of circumstances, when we have those types of data sets, we often assume that the population is normally distributed; in which case we would expect our data to follow the empirical rule. The empirical rule states that we should expect 68% of our data to be within one standard deviation of the mean, 95% of our data to be within two standard deviations of the mean, and 99.7% of our data to be within three standard deviations of the mean. So only 0.3% of data points are likely to be farther than three standard deviations from the mean. Again, I must remind you this works when we have the well-centered, symmetrical, bell-shaped curve. Unfortunately, the empirical rule begins to lose value the farther our data set strays from the classic…

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