Questions tagged [statistics]

This tag is for questions about the usage and meaning of statistical terminology and the names for statistical entities in English.

40 questions
2
votes
2 answers

Do I replicate an experiment n times or n-1 times for a total of n experiments

I have an simulation I want to run a total of n times. (I defined the parameters of the simulation myself, so it's not something from someone else I am trying to duplicate.) Do I then say that I replicated the experiment n times, or n–1 times? How…
cassava
  • 133
2
votes
1 answer

Proportion of unique words in typical English text?

I recall hearing a statistic that, in a typical block of English text (e.g. a novel) a really suprisingly large proportion (a third? half?) of the distinct words that appear, appear only once. That is, if you counted each occurrence of each distinct…
TenMinJoe
  • 123
1
vote
0 answers

Are there English letter frequency charts based on the assumed age of the speaker/reader?

Has anyone done work to construct letter frequency charts based on the assumed age of the reader/speaker, and also spoken word vs written text? One would expect that letter usage would be different in books targeted at (for example) a 3rd grader vs…
user4574
  • 111
1
vote
1 answer

Can you be in the “95% percentile”?

I have a feeling there's only one way to say this: you can be in the “95th percentile”. A colleague of mine says it's OK to say “the 95% percentile”, which doesn't seem to make mathematical sense to me. What's correct?
0
votes
1 answer

Standard deviation for average sentence and paragraph length?

I was able to find a source that gave an average for sentence length in the english language of 14 words. I am curious as to what the standard deviation for that number is. Also, I couldn't find any averages for how many sentences are in a…