Akademik

A proposition that can be tested, and can be established as a law or principle. SEE ALSO: law, principle, rule.

- Bayes t. the impacts of new data on the evidential merits of competing scientific hypotheses are compared by computing for each the product of the antecedent plausibility (the prior probability) and the likelihood of the current data given that hypothesis (the conditional probability) and rescaling them so that their total is unity (the rescaled values being posterior probabilities). SEE ALSO: diagnostic sensitivity, diagnostic specificity, predictive value.

- Bernoulli t. SYN: Bernoulli law.

- central limit t. the sum (or average) of n realizations of the same process, provided only that it has a finite variance, will approach the gaussian distribution as n becomes indefinitely large. This theory provides a broad warrant for the use of normal theory even for nongaussian data. In the form stated here, it constitutes the classical version; more general versions allow serious relaxation of the usual assumptions.

- Gibbs t. substances that lower the surface tension of the pure dispersion medium tend to collect in its surface, whereas substances that raise the surface tension tend to remain out of the surface film.