Data Analysis with Microsoft Excel: Updated for Office 2007

216 Fundamentals of Statistics

Having learned something about the uniform distribution, let’s observe the

sampling distribution of the sample average.

To generate the sampling distribution of the uniform distribution:

1 Click the Uniform option button on the Central Limit Theorem

worksheet.

2 Enter 22 in the Minimum box and 2 in the Maximum box. See

Figure 5-26.

Figure 5-26

Setting the

parameters

for the

uniform

distribution

3 Click the OK button.

Excel generates 150 random samples for the uniform distribution.

The initial sample size is 1, which is equivalent to generating 150

different observations from the uniform distribution. The initial av-

erage value should be close to 0 and the initial standard deviation

value should be close to 1.15.

4 Drag the scrollbar down to increase the sample size from 1 to 16.

Figure 5-27 shows the sampling distribution for the average un-

der different sample sizes (your charts and values will be slightly

different).

You may want to unfreeze and freeze the y axis in order to display

the histograms in a more detailed scale.