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In my last post I discussed how to create a normal distribution in Excel, and that post can be read here:- https://medium.com/@tracyrenee61/how-to-create-a-normal-distribution-in-excel-08bf6213f862
In this post I minted to discuss how to create the Student’s t distribution in Excel.
The Irish statistician William Sealy Gosset published “Biometrika” in 1908 under the pseudonym Student. This paper refers to the distribution as the “frequency distribution of standard deviations of samples drawn from a normal population”. This work became well known through the work of Ronald Fischer, who called the distribution “Student’s distribution” and represented the test value with the letter t.
Student’s t distribution is a probability distribution that generalises the standard normal distribution. Like the normal distribution, it is symmetrical around 0 and bell shaped.
The t distribution has heavier tails and is controlled by the parameter v. At v=1 the t distribution becomes the standard Cauchy distribution, which has very fat tails. At v=infinity the t distribution becomes the standard normal distribution with very thin tails.
The formula for student’s t distribution is:-
