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About 68% of values drawn from a normal distribution are within one standard deviation σ from the mean; about 95% of the values lie within two standard deviations; and about 99.7% are within three standard deviations. [8] This fact is known as the 68–95–99.7 (empirical) rule, or the 3-sigma rule.
In the empirical sciences, the so-called three-sigma rule of thumb (or 3 σ rule) expresses a conventional heuristic that nearly all values are taken to lie within three standard deviations of the mean, and thus it is empirically useful to treat 99.7% probability as near certainty.
The formula for the population standard deviation (of a finite population) can be applied to the sample, using the size of the sample as the size of the population (though the actual population size from which the sample is drawn may be much larger).
For example, it is used to equate a probability for a random variable with the Lebesgue-Stieltjes integral typically associated with computing the probability: = for all in the Borel σ-algebra on , where () is the cumulative distribution function for , defined on , while is a probability measure, defined on a σ-algebra of subsets of some ...
Sigmoid curves are also common in statistics as cumulative distribution functions (which go from 0 to 1), such as the integrals of the logistic density, the normal density, and Student's t probability density functions. The logistic sigmoid function is invertible, and its inverse is the logit function.
Firstly, if the true population mean is unknown, then the sample variance (which uses the sample mean in place of the true mean) is a biased estimator: it underestimates the variance by a factor of (n − 1) / n; correcting this factor, resulting in the sum of squared deviations about the sample mean divided by n-1 instead of n, is called ...
In specific fields such as particle physics and manufacturing, statistical significance is often expressed in multiples of the standard deviation or sigma (σ) of a normal distribution, with significance thresholds set at a much stricter level (for example 5σ).
Examples are the simple gravitation law connecting masses and distance with the resulting force, or the formula for equilibrium concentrations of chemicals in a solution that connects concentrations of educts and products. Assuming log-normal distributions of the variables involved leads to consistent models in these cases.