Abstract
FREQUENCY distributions of numbers of eggs, insects, spores, or other biological entities are descriptive of discrete variation, and can never be represented exactly by a normal distribution or by any other distribution of a continuous variate. Nevertheless, when the number of observations and the range of variation is large, such distributions may often be adequately represented by a continuous distribution. Experience has shown that transformation of discrete-counts to a scale of ✓n, log n, or log (n + 1) may considerably assist the representation by a normal distribution.
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References
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Finney, D. J., "Probit Analysis" (London: Camb. Univ. Press, 1947).
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FINNEY, D. Transformation of Frequency Distributions. Nature 162, 898 (1948). https://doi.org/10.1038/162898a0
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1038/162898a0
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