ASSIGNMENT 1 DATA ANALYSIS FOR RESEARCH MS18D003

QUESTION 1 of 2

A prosperous and old farmer named MacDonald, inspired by a book on statistics, weighs all of his sheep
and goats. Can he reasonably expect the goats' weights to be normally distributed? Can he expect the
distribution of the weights of all of his animals to be Gaussian?

ANSWER

The weight of the goats are normally distributed. Similarly the weights of the sheep’s are also
normally distributed. This is because of divine nature.

The weights of all his animals are also distributed normally with

 Mean equal to sum of the individuals mean and

 Variance equal to sum of the individual variance.

Proof:

Consider the mean and squared deviation of goat’s weight(X) as µx and 𝜎𝑥2 .

Similarly the mean and squared deviation of sheep’s weight(Y) as µy and 𝜎𝑦2 .

X~N (µx, 𝜎𝑥2 )

Y~N (µy, 𝜎𝑦2 )

X and Y are independent. The animal weight is found to be Z=X+Y.

Characteristics function of X and Y are given by

𝝈𝟐 𝒕𝟐
(𝒊𝒕𝒙) (𝒊𝒕µ𝒙 − 𝒙 )
𝝋𝒙 (𝒕) = 𝑬(𝒆 = 𝒆 𝟐

𝝈𝟐
𝒚𝒕
𝟐
(𝒊𝒕𝒚) (𝒊𝒕µ𝒚 − )
𝝋𝒚 (𝒕) = 𝑬(𝒆 =𝒆 𝟐

Characteristics function of Z is given by

𝝋𝒛 (𝒕) = 𝝋𝒙+𝒚 (𝒕) = 𝑬(𝒆𝒊𝒕(𝒙+𝒚) )

= 𝝋𝒙 (𝒕) ∗ 𝝋𝒚 (𝒕)

𝝈𝟐 𝒕𝟐 𝝈𝟐
𝒚𝒕
𝟐
(𝒊𝒕µ𝒙 − 𝒙 ) (𝒊𝒕µ𝒚 − )
𝟐 𝟐
=𝒆 ∗𝒆
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ASSIGNMENT 1 DATA ANALYSIS FOR RESEARCH MS18D003

(𝝈𝟐 𝟐 𝟐
𝒙 +𝝈𝒚 )𝒕
(𝒊𝒕(µ𝒙 +µ𝒚 )− )
𝝋𝒛 (𝒕) = 𝒆 𝟐

Therefore Z~N (µx +µy, 𝜎𝑥2 + 𝜎𝑦2 ).

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