Understanding
Central
Limit Theorem is of EXTREME importance in statistics. This concept usually
sets the boundary line between people who understand statistics and people who
don’t.
What is confusing
about this topic is usually terminology – mean of sampling distribution of the
mean, standard deviation of the sampling distribution of the mean – you get the
point. What I wanted to do is to make this thing easier to comprehend by using
Will Hopkins approach by using simulations. Will Hopkins created great and must
read series of spreadsheet designed to help out lost souls (like me) comprehend
basic statistic concepts. You can find those spreadsheets and description HERE.
What was
lacking in Hopkins spreadsheets was simulation of central limit theorem. Thus I
have created this spreadsheet using his famous template. I suggest watching
lectures by Khan
Academy and then playing with the spreadsheet. Modifying various numbers
and seeing how that affects the output might give you deeper understanding of
this fundamental concept behind all inferential statistics. I believe I still
lack some of the nuts and bolts to get, so I might listen to my own advice and
check the Khan videos.
Click HERE
to download the Excel spreadsheet.
Great work as normal Mladen. I just have a quick question. How did you add the link to automatically download the file. This would really help me out for my own blog.
ReplyDeleteThanks
John
If you use Dropbox John, put the file in Shared folder. Once you did this right-click and choose copy the link or something like that.
ReplyDeleteThanks for the feedback John. BTW, check the graph on tab 3 - I was referring to something like this couple of day ago. The problem in Excel is that you cannot make this horizontal with band lines which might represent SWC (at least I don't know how to do it :) ). Need to learn ggplot in R :)