Dear Allstaters,
I am researching what I thought would be a simple concept: degrees of
freedom. While reading the archives, I noticed that a number of people
found errors in their data that are directly related to this topic. I'm
beginning to feel as if degrees of freedom are blindly applied by people
like me, but never fully understood. Moreover, the somewhat mysterious
concept of degrees of freedom, (typically defined as n-1 and used to
determine mean-squares in ANOVA's) is not explained very well in any of
the stats books that I've looked at. I would sincerely appreciate
everyone's input and I will compile the answers.
1. Where does it come from?
2. Why is it always 1 less than n?
3. What, exactly, is degrees of freedom?
Thank you,
Teresa Beck
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