# Difference between revisions of "Eleisha's Segment 10: The Central Limit Theorem"

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To Think About:

1. Take 12 random values, each uniform between 0 and 1. Add them up and subtract 6. Prove that the result is close to a random value drawn from the Normal distribution with mean zero and standard deviation 1.

2. Invent a family of functions, each different, that look like those in Slide 3: they all have value 1 at x = 0; they all have zero derivative at x = 0; and they generally (not necessarily monotonically) decrease to zero at large x. Now multiply 10 of them together and graph the result near the origin (i.e., reproduce what Slide 3 was sketching).

3. For what value(s) of $\displaystyle \nu$ does the Student distribution (Segment 8, Slide 4) have a convergent 1st and 2nd moment, but divergent 3rd and higher moments?

To Calculate:

1. A distribution with moments as in problem 3 above has a well-defined mean and variance. Does the CLT hold for the sum of RVs from such a distribution? If not, what goes wrong in the proof? Is the mean of the sum equal to the sum of the individual means? What about the variance of the sum? What, qualitatively, does the distribution of the sum of a bunch of them look like?

2. Give an explanation of Bessel's correction in the last expression on slide 5. If, as we see, the MAP calculation gives the factor 1/N, why would one ever want to use 1/(N-1) instead? (There are various wiki and stackoverflow pages on this. See if they make sense to you!)

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