What is the Student t distribution?
The Student t distribution, also known as the t-distribution, is a probability distribution that is commonly used in statistics to estimate population parameters when the sample size is small and the population standard deviation is unknown. It was developed by William Sealy Gosset, a statistician working for the Guinness brewery in Dublin, Ireland, in 1908. Gosset used the pseudonym “A. Student” when publishing his work to protect his employer’s trade secrets.
The Student t distribution is similar to the normal distribution, but it has heavier tails, meaning that it has more extreme values on either side of the mean. This characteristic makes it particularly useful for small sample sizes, where the normal distribution may not be a good approximation. The shape of the t distribution depends on the degrees of freedom, which is determined by the sample size. As the sample size increases, the t distribution approaches the normal distribution.
