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M&M Statistics

I have been working with M&M's throughout this classes course.

From the data I gathered I developed histograms and calculated descriptive statistics.

Based on this data I then can make judgments on what I can expect to see when I buy packages of M&M's at the store.

To do this I calculate what is called confidence limits - these are based on the normal curve.
These confidence limits are what I expect to happen a certain percentage of the time based on the data I gathered unless something happens to change things.

A 95% confidence limit is basically plus and minus two standard deviations from the mean in both directions

the attached illustration shows confidence limits of 68%, 95% and 99.7%.

For our M&M data - for the regular 1.69 size bags of M&M's, the historical average works out to be 56.5 M&M's per bag - with a standard deviation of 1.2 M&M's.

please answer the following questions.

1. How can we use this information to determine what we should get in a bag of M&M's 95% of the time?

2. How do you think the M&M company uses this information in quality control?



Solution Summary

This is a set of questions regarding standard deviation and M&Ms.