Statistics interview question: What is better, the Empirical Rule or Chebyshev’s Theorem?

I learned about the Empirical Rule and Chebyshev’s Theorem when I watched my first statistics course on YouTube. It was an eight hour course that covered a lot of topics and helped me to expand my grasp of the subject. Statistics is a great subject and any person endeavouring to pursue a career in data science needs to have a firm grounding on the subject.

One thing that a job applicant may be asked during a data science interview is what is better, the Empirical Rule or Chebyshev’s Theorem. Before I can answer that question I think it is necessary to review exactly what these two concepts are:-

The Empirical Rule

The Empirical Rule (sometimes called the three sigma rule) is a rule in statistics that states that, for normally distributed data, almost all of the data will fall within three deviations either side of the mean.

More specifically:-

68% of the data will fall within the first deviation,

95% of the data will fall within the second deviation, and

99.7% of the data will fall within the third deviation.

The Empirical Rule can only be applied to a symmetric or unimodal distribution because it is only applicable…