Central limit theorem

If a set of data is IID with n observations, (Y1, Y2, . . . Yn), and with a finite variance
then as n goes to infinity the distribution of Y ¯ becomes normal. So as long as n is
reasonably large we can think of the distribution of the mean as being approximately
normal.
This is a remarkable result; what it says is that, regardless of the form of the population
distribution, the sampling distribution will be normal as long as it is based on a large
enough sample. To take an extreme example, suppose we think of a lottery which pays
out one winning ticket for every 100 tickets sold. If the prize for a winning ticket is
$100 and the cost of each ticket is $1, then, on average, we would expect to earn $1
per ticket bought. But the population distribution would look very strange; 99 out of
every 100 tickets would have a return of zero and one ticket would have a return of
$100. If we tried to graph the distribution of returns it would have a huge spike at zero
and a small spike at $100 and no observations anywhere else. But, as long as we draw
a reasonably large sample, when we calculate the mean return over the sample it will
be centred on $1 with a normal distribution around 1.
The importance of the central limit theorem is that it allows us to know what the
sampling distribution of the mean should look like as long as the mean is based on a
reasonably large sample. So we can now replace the arbitrary triangular distribution in
Figure 1.1 with a much more reasonable one, the normal distribution.
A final small piece of our statistical framework is the law of large numbers. This
simply states that if a sample (Y1, Y2, . . . Yn) is IID with a finite variance then Y ¯ is
a consistent estimator of µ, the true population mean. This can be formally stated as
Pr(|Y ¯ −µ| < ε) → 1 as n → ∞, meaning that the probability that the absolute difference
between the mean estimate and the true population mean will be less than a small
positive number tends to one as the sample size tends to infinity. This can be proved
straightforwardly, since, as we have seen, the variance of the sampling distribution of
the mean is inversely proportional to n; hence as n goes to infinity the variance of the
sampling distribution goes to zero and the mean is forced to the true population mean.
We can now summarize: Y ¯ is an unbiased and consistent estimate of the true population mean µ; it is approximately distributed
as a normal distribution with a variance
which is inversely proportional to n; this may be expressed as N(µ, σ 2/n). So if we subtract the population mean from Y ¯ and
divide by its standard deviation we will create a
variable which has a mean of zero and a unit variance. This is called standardizing the
variable.