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Exercise

rnorm, dnorm, and the weight of newborns

Here is a small data set with the birth weights of six newborn babies in grams.

c(3164, 3362, 4435, 3542, 3578, 4529)
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Let's assume that the Normal distribution is a decent model of birth weight data.

  • Given the birth weight data, what would be reasonable values of the mean (mu) and standard deviation (sigma) that generated this data?
  • Assign these value to mu and sigma.

No need to do anything fancy here, just eyeball the data and try to come up with something reasonable.

Remember: The standard deviation sigma describes the spread of the distribution, where around 70% of the drawn values will be within one standard deviation from the mean.