Normal distribution, degrees of freedom, etc etc my brain is blue screening. How am I supposed to remember all this shit? HELP.

I'm bombarded with like 12 new complex terms in each lecture that I'm supposed to just fully understand. Gdhsjfbe fuck my ADHD brain.

  • silent_water [she/her]
    ·
    9 months ago

    Degrees of freedom is the number of observations in your sample minus 1 and is used to look up a value in a table.

    doesn't this lead to a lot of extraneous variables that are actually linearly dependent on a smaller set? or worse -- overconstraining?

    • BodyBySisyphus [he/him]
      ·
      9 months ago

      This isn't a universal definition of degrees of freedom, it's just "degrees of freedom as it applies in an undergraduate level stats course," which is typically for the t distribution. It's n-1 because you assume all your observations are independent of one another. In other contexts (ANOVA, e.g.), the calculation is different.

      • silent_water [she/her]
        ·
        9 months ago

        I get that, just thought it was a strange definition given what degrees of freedom actually refers to