Post War Vintage....1949 Leaf Paige

[Archive]

Posted By: Glenn

"And, indeed there was between 10 - 15 cards of each of the
48 players in this series. Pretty even distribution, which is
what you would expect ? No....?"

Well, yes and no. It is what most people "would expect", but most people don't understand the statistical properties of random distributions and therefore overestimate how close the numbers in a random sample of this nature should be. It would actually be quite astonishing if all of the numbers fell between 10 and 15.

If the total number of each card in the entire printing run is equal and we randomly sample 576 cards from the printing run, the distribution will be approximately normal (i.e., a bell curve). Technically, it would follow something called a Poisson distribution which is not exactly identical to a normal bell curve, but it's pretty darn close.

Anyway, if you have the exact numbers of each card from the find, I can analyze the data and see if they are skewed enough for us to reject the hypothesis that the find really was nothing more than a random sample of a population containing equal numbers of all the cards in the series.