Yahoo Answers is shutting down on May 4th, 2021 (Eastern Time) and the Yahoo Answers website is now in read-only mode. There will be no changes to other Yahoo properties or services, or your Yahoo account. You can find more information about the Yahoo Answers shutdown and how to download your data on this help page.
In statistics, how do you calculate the probability associated with a certain Z score? Tables don't give P values for Z scores above 3. ?
How would I find the area under the normal curve between Z= -5 and Z = +5 ? Or some other numbers >3?
Tables say it is almost 1 and the tail above Z=3 is just about 0, but how can I find the actual numbers?
3 Answers
- ?Lv 77 months ago
find a more extensive table. Abramowitz & Stegun. Table 26.1,
p 972
P(3.00)
= .99865 01020
P(5.00)
= .99999 97133
And table 26.2 large arguments.
- log Q(x)
5 6.54265
- DixonLv 77 months ago
When it is normalised, ie μ = 0, σ = 1, and you work directly with z, then
pdf(z) = 1/√(2π) e^(-½ z²)
Then you integrate that between the particular limits of z to get the probabilities you want (good luck with that). Note that the tails stretch to ±∞ but since the mean is centered on zero we know that each side has an area of 0.5. So for instance, p(4) is 0.5 + the integral from 0 to 4.
Basically, you either use WolframAlpha or you track down some tables where someone has already done the work, and probably gives the results as p(>z) so that it is just a tiny number in scientific form, rather than 0.9 followed by a ton of 9's.
- rotchmLv 77 months ago
You can lookup in the ztable and find the corresponding area.
The "exact" way to find the values (or to create the table) is by evaluating the integral of the PDF from z=a to z=b.
Such an integral can't be exactly found in closed form (except for some specific values) and numerical approximations are thus used.
For more info, see