90 % of the t distribution

William Sealy Gosset was great. He improved beer at Guinness by using the statistics that existed at the time. Not happy with that, he invented new statistics to brew even better beer. The things he invented are used all over the place now, but Guinness wanted to keep him a secret weapon, so they made him publish his results under the fake name Student. One thing Gosset realised is that it is wrong to compute 90 % confidence intervals for the mean by taking the standard deviation of the sample, and assume a normal distribution, like-a-so: \[\hat{\mu} \pm 1.645 \hat{\sigma}\] (Continue reading the full article on the web.)