Suppose someone was diagnosed with a form of cancer that had a median survival time of eight months. Doctors argued that active treatment including chemotherapy and surgery would be futile. Explain whether or not you agree with the doctors' argument based on statistical concepts? On what grounds? (Hint: you will need to think about the distribution of the variable in this case.)
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!
Introduction:
The median of a data set is a value that divides the top half (or top 50%) of the data from the bottom half of the data.
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