Practical Data Analysis with JMP®

The Normal Model

As in Chapter 5, we'll rely on your principal textbook to provide an extensive introduction to normal distributions, and in this section review several attributes of the normal distributions that are essential for practical data analysis. Though we can use normal distributions in many ways, one frequent application is as a model for the population or process from which we're sampling data. Specifically, we often want to ask whether a normal model suitably describes observations of a random variable.

There are an infinite number of normal distributions, each uniquely identified by its mean μ and standard deviation σ. Figure 6.3 shows the graph of a normal distribution known as the Standard Normal Distribution whose mean equals ...