Overproduction of uric acid in the body can be an indication of cell breakdown. This may be an advance indication of illness such as gout, leukaemia, or lymphoma. Over a period of three months, an adult male patient has thirty blood tests for uric acid. The mean concentration was 5.35 mg/dl. The distribution of uric acid in healthy adult males can be assumed to have a standard deviation of 1.85 mg/dl. a) Find a 95% confidence interval for the mean concentration of uric acid in the patient’s blood. What is the estimation error? b) Find the sample size necessary to obtain a 95% confidence level with an estimation error of 0.50 mg/dl for the mean concentration of uric acid in this patient’s blood.
Continuous Probability Distributions
Probability distributions are of two types, which are continuous probability distributions and discrete probability distributions. A continuous probability distribution contains an infinite number of values. For example, if time is infinite: you could count from 0 to a trillion seconds, billion seconds, so on indefinitely. A discrete probability distribution consists of only a countable set of possible values.
Normal Distribution
Suppose we had to design a bathroom weighing scale, how would we decide what should be the range of the weighing machine? Would we take the highest recorded human weight in history and use that as the upper limit for our weighing scale? This may not be a great idea as the sensitivity of the scale would get reduced if the range is too large. At the same time, if we keep the upper limit too low, it may not be usable for a large percentage of the population!
Overproduction of uric acid in the body can be an indication of cell breakdown. This may
be an advance indication of illness such as gout, leukaemia, or lymphoma. Over a period
of three months, an adult male patient has thirty blood tests for uric acid. The mean
concentration was 5.35 mg/dl. The distribution of uric acid in healthy adult males can be
assumed to have a standard deviation of 1.85 mg/dl.
a) Find a 95% confidence interval for the mean concentration of uric acid in the
patient’s blood. What is the estimation error?
b) Find the
estimation error of 0.50 mg/dl for the mean concentration of uric acid in this
patient’s blood.
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