Mintb10 NoLink
Mintb10 NoLink
Mintb10 NoLink
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NORMALITY OF SAMPLE MEANS
Close your data window from the previous example and open the
worksheet ProbDist.mtw that you saved from Lesson 8. First make a bar
graph of this discrete distribution. (See pages 40 and 41 of Lesson 9.)
The graph is shown below, and it certainly does not look normal.
Now click on Calc > Random Data > Discrete. Type 1000 in the
"Number of rows of data to generate" box and C3-C102 in the "Store in
column(s):" box. Select C1 X into the "Values in:" box and P(X) into
the "Probabilities in:" box. Now click "OK". You now have 100
samples of size 1000 in columns C3 through C102. Find the means of
these 100 samples, (they will be stored in C103 through C202) and
stack them in C203 as we did in the example above.
Give C203 the label "Sample Means." Now use our basic statistics
function to find the mean, and variance of the sample means. They are
shown in the figure below, but yours may not match exactly.
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In Lesson 8 we computed the mean and variance of this distribution to
be 3.15 and 1.0275 respectively, so we should expect the mean and
variance for the sample means to be 3.15 and 1.0275/1000 = 0.0010275
respectively. We can see that the experimental values for the mean and
variance are quite close to what we would expect.
Finally, we will draw a histogram of the sample means. We will use
7 bins but leave the labels in the middle rather than at the cut points.
We can see that from a distribution that was skewed left we have
obtained a probability distribution of sample means that is
approximately normal by repeated sampling. The Central Limit
Theorem tells us that the distribution of the means will get closer to
normal the larger the sample size.
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MINITAB ASSIGNMENT
(a) Create 100 samples of size 1000, find the means of the samples,
and stack the sample means in a column labeled "Sample
Means."
(d) Create a bar graph of this distribution. Be sure to set the space
between bars to zero as was done in the example above so that
it looks like a probability distribution.
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(e) Create a histogram with 7 classes of Sample Means.
(f) Does your graph from part (e) look closer to being normal than
the one from part (d)?