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In the social sciences, a result may be considered statistically significant if its confidence level is of the order of a two-sigma effect (95%), while in particle physics and astrophysics, there is a convention of requiring statistical significance of a five-sigma effect (99.99994% confidence) to qualify as a discovery.
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.
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 ...
In statistics and in particular statistical theory, unbiased estimation of a standard deviation is the calculation from a statistical sample of an estimated value of the standard deviation (a measure of statistical dispersion) of a population of values, in such a way that the expected value of the calculation equals the true value.
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.
The Student's t distribution plays a role in a number of widely used statistical analyses, including Student's t test for assessing the statistical significance of the difference between two sample means, the construction of confidence intervals for the difference between two population means, and in linear regression analysis.
This approximate formula is for moderate to large sample sizes; the reference gives the exact formulas for any sample size, and can be applied to heavily autocorrelated time series like Wall Street stock quotes.