Gaussian (Normal) Distribution
The Gaussian (normal) distribution is the foundational probability distribution in statistics, describing the bell-shaped spread of measurement errors, process variation, and many natural phenomena. As a hard skill it requires understanding the mean, standard deviation, and empirical rule, testing for normality before applying parametric methods, and knowing when the Gaussian assumption breaks down — as it does for skewed battery failure-time data or heavily tailed outlier distributions. Battery quality engineers and data scientists apply Gaussian statistics when interpreting formation capacity distributions, setting specification limits on cell-grading tests, and computing process capability indices (Cp, Cpk) that assume normally distributed data.
