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The Student-t
distribution Student(n)
is quite difficult to calculate, but when n
is large it is well approximated by a Normal
distribution, as follows:
Student(n) » Normal(0, 1)
A general rule for this approximation is that n > 30. The relationship between the Student-t and Normal distributions is not intuitively obvious, but is readily made apparent by doing a Taylor series expansion about x = 0 of the probability density function for the Student distribution.