Chebyshev’s Inequality Theorem (student stuff)

12 Jun, 2013 at 16:21 | Posted in Statistics & Econometrics | Comments Off on Chebyshev’s Inequality Theorem (student stuff)

Chebyshev’s Inequality Theorem – named after Russian mathematician Pafnuty Chebyshev – states that for a population (or sample) at most 1/k² of the distribution’s values can be more than k standard deviations away from the mean. The beauty of the theorem is that although we may not know the exact distribution of the data – e.g. if it’s normally distributed  – we may still say with certitude (since the theorem holds universally)  that there are bounds on probabilities!