On Mon, Oct 21, 2013 at 4:29 PM, Tom Lane <tgl@sss.pgh.pa.us> wrote:
> Hm. It's been a long time since college statistics, but doesn't the
> entire concept of standard deviation depend on the assumption that the
> underlying distribution is more-or-less normal (Gaussian)?
I don't see how. The standard deviation here would be expressed in
units of milliseconds. Now, that could be misleading, in that like a
mean average, it might "mischaracterize" the distribution. But it's
still got to be a big improvement.
I like the idea of a decay, but can't think of a principled scheme offhand.
--
Peter Geoghegan
