Question 276:

Asked on July 11, 2008

Tags: Normally Distributed

1

Answer:

No answer provided yet.

If a population or sample is not normally distributed (say it is positively skewed) the mean will be affected and not be an accurate representation of the center of the distribution. Positively skewed populations are things like salaries of employees, home values (very large values skew the whole distribution to the right).

The Central limit theorem shows that as sample sizes get larger the sampling distribution of the mean begins to resemble the normal distribution. This especially becomes the case as the sample size gets above 30.