Talk:68–95–99.7 rule

message: Shouldn't this just redirect to normal distribution? Richard001 06:30, 11 April 2007 (UTC)
replies: text: No. This page gives a practical dervied result of a normal distribution. Its also much more directly useful to most people than the math-heavy normal distribution article (which is linked to). --Nantonos (talk) 13:16, 29 June 2008 (UTC)
replies: text: However, the only useful information are the percentages, which you can work out anyway from the Normal Distribution article. It's pretty misleading to wrap it up in an 'empirical rule', since it's not *empirical* by that definition. Darktachyon (talk) 09:24, 22 October 2010 (UTC)
thread_title: Merging or keeping as own article

message: Appears to be an error in the example used in "A description and illustration using Java Applets by Balasubramanian Narasimhan"
Exerpt:
An Example
Let us apply the Empirical Rule to Example 1.17 from Moore and McCabe. 
The distribution of heights of American women aged 18 to 24 is approximately normally distributed with mean 65.5 inches and standard deviation 2.5 inches. From the above rule, it follows that 
68% 
of these American women have heights between 65.5 - 2.5 and 65.5 + 2.5 inches, or between 63 and 68 inches, 
95% 
of these American women have heights between 65.5 - 2(2.5) and 65.5 + 2(2.5) inches, or between 63 and 68 inches.
It should read:
95% 
of these American women have heights between 65.5 - 2(2.5) and 65.5 + 2(2.5) inches, or between 60.5 and 70.5 inches.--Hallbg (talk) 17:15, 21 July 2009 (UTC)
replies: text: The demo linked to was reported earlier as not working, but it worked OK in Firefox 3.5.5 today for me. --Kay Dekker (talk) 21:14, 14 November 2009 (UTC)
thread_title:  "A description and illustration using Java Applets by Balasubramanian Narasimhan" 

message: Where do the figures come from. What is the reasoning behind using these values?  — Preceding unsigned comment added by 92.27.94.107 (talk) 10:32, 8 March 2012 (UTC)
thread_title:  Why 68, 95, and 99.7 

message: There is no link to the German chapter that talks about the same thing:
https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Standardabweichung#Streuintervalle
I already tried to get it linked, but the script seems not to provide a chapter-specific link. If that's true, there is no way to link it as the main article talks about standard deviation, which is already linked.
Anybody has an idea how to solve this or should it just be ignored?
Moedn (talk) 18:33, 13 February 2016 (UTC)
thread_title: German reference missing

message: Hi, new here, so apologies in advance for bad form. 
From the intro: 
The "three sigma rule of thumb" is related to a result also known as the three-sigma rule, which states that even for non-normally distributed variables, at least 98% of cases should fall within properly-calculated three-sigma intervals. [2]
This seems in contradiction to the Chebyshev's inequality page which gives the bound as 88.9%? 
Should this be modified to "most distribution's" with a reference to http://www.qualitydigest.com/inside/twitter-ed/are-you-sure-we-don-t-need-normally-distributed-data.html ? Doc-aj (talk) 16:28, 11 March 2016 (UTC)
thread_title:  Contrasting to non-normal data 

message: Hi, also new here, just wanted to compliment the wikigeniuses who gave the Table of Numerical Values the "Approx. freq. for daily event" section. Should anyone ever try to argue that it doesn't belong on Wikipedia (math =  original research?), here's my vote, as a user, that this was helpful, informative, and exactly the sort of information that belongs in Cyclopedies. 
Oh, and I see that there was discussion almost a decade ago complaining about the title. I like the title.Gsnerd (talk) 01:05, 15 June 2016 (UTC)
thread_title: A compliment

message: Is the paragraph about "The Black Swan" necessary? I'm not sure Taleb counts as a credible enough statistician to be mentioned here; even if he were, he might have a better place on the page for the normal distribution. 
But on top of that, the un-cited critique of his ideas is, as far as I can tell, flat-out wrong. The gambler's fallacy doesn't say anything about high-probability events not undermining confidence in a theory. Second, with a sufficiently high prior against something, a single event can completely undermine a hypothesis. If every person on Earth hovered off the ground for twenty minutes tomorrow, you wouldn't say, "Well that's extremely unlikely according to the current laws of physics, but it only happened once. We'll revise our theories if it happens a few more times". You would start asking questions immediately. 
I added a "citation needed" tag but I think the whole paragraph should be deleted.  — Preceding unsigned comment added by Sam Jaques (talk • contribs) 22:19, 11 November 2016 (UTC)
thread_title:  Black Swan Paragrah 

message: What is the Pr in the equation? It would be helpful if someone would describe that. 198.213.89.136 (talk) 20:24, 17 July 2017 (UTC)
replies: text: Done. Jamplevia (talk) 17:40, 8 January 2022 (UTC)
thread_title:  Pr 

message: I'm sorry, I don't see how this is an improvement. 
The values discussed are those of a normal distribution, so why would you show a sample of an "approximately normal distributed set", when all that does is give you random deviations forcing you to insert "approximately" in every statement? 
Just say these are the expectation values if the distribution is normal. 
--dab (𒁳) 05:32, 30 August 2018 (UTC)
thread_title: "histogram-based illustration"

message: Very useful article when you need these. One thing, though. I would have made the "outside the range" column for each end.  That is, half the probability and twice the number before it happens, as it seems that more often one needs to know that.  But then again, it isn't so hard to multiply/divide by 2. Gah4 (talk) 11:09, 11 July 2021 (UTC)
thread_title:  Thanks 

message: I cannot find any article which covers usage of sigma probability. For example, five-sigma is required to prove the existence of a new particle such as the Higgs boson, whereas two-sigma is the standard in radiocarbon dating. Can anyone point me to an article covering this aspect? If not, that is a major gap in Wikipedia's coverage. Dudley Miles (talk) 11:02, 19 November 2022 (UTC)
thread_title:  Usage of sigma 

message: For larger than the 8 sigma and of the table, there should be a simple asymptotic limit. I might find the reference, but if someone else finds it first, they can add it. Gah4 (talk) 20:56, 22 January 2024 (UTC)
thread_title:  asymptotic limit