Describe 1. a population and 2. a variable whose values you suspect of having a normal distribution in that population. What are the distribution’s 3. mean and 4. standard deviation likely to be (approximately)? 5. What might the properties of the distribution tell us about that population? 6. If you had access to the appropriate data, how might you be able to confirm or refute that that variable actually is normal in that population?
to achieve full credit each week, you must: 1) answer the discussion question(s), and 2) provide feedback to at least one other student’s post. Each discussion question is divided into numbered points; your grade for each question will be based on the number of points that you clearly, meaningfully, and/or correctly identify ( If any point asks you to describe something, then any population, value, etc. will do, and if any point asks you to find something, you need only to use the formulas.)Feedback must include at least one original idea and must be more than “I agree” or “Great job!”; Try to add to the person’s analysis, point out an error, change an input and see what happens,
Discussion Questions will be posted each week and will be required for each except for Week 6, which will be optional.The idea of the Discussion Questions is for me to see that you understand the week’s material by your providing an example of your own to illustrate the concept or procedure; no research is needed, and any answers that you provide can be purely hypothetical.Timely,thoughtful and well-written responses to the discussion questions are part of the participation grade and account for 20% of the final grade
here is an example and the person i want to write a review on (please write a comment on for this person too about their work so i can post it.)
1. People in the U.S. that have a bachelor’s degree.
2. Annual salary is a variable that I believe would have a normal distribution in this population.
3. According to an article on SmartAsset.com, the average salary (mean) of people in the U.S. with a bachelor’s degree is about $59,000 annually.
4. Starting salaries for a person “newly graduated” with a bachelor’s degree are somewhere around $45,000 annually, so with a normal distribution that would make the range $28,000 ($73,000-$45,000). To estimate standard deviation for symmetric data, you can divide the range by 6, so I would estimate that the standard deviation would be around $4,670.
5. The properties of the distribution could tell us the percentages of people in the population that make greater than a certain annual salary. For example, if we wanted to know what percent of people with bachelor’s degrees make more than $70,000 per year, we could calculate the z-score (70,000-59,000)/4670=2.36. This corresponds to a proportion of .9909 of people making less than $70,000 per year, so only .91% of people in the U.S. with a bachelor’s degree would make more than $70,000 per year. I would expect the population curve to shift along the “x-axis”, if you broke the data out by regions. More prosperous regions would have a curve shifted right (overall higher salaries), and less prosperous regions would have a curve shifted left from the overall nationwide averages.
6. If I had access to the appropriate data, I could use software to create a histogram and then a density curve of the data (after eliminating outliers using the 1.5 x IQR rule). This would visually show if the data appeared to fall in a normal distribution. I could also do further calculations, finding the median and mean, as well as the first and third quartiles to see if the data closely fit the pattern.
