A standard normal deviate is a
normally distributed deviate. It is a
realization of a standard normal random variable, defined as a
random variable
A random variable (also called random quantity, aleatory variable, or stochastic variable) is a mathematical formalization of a quantity or object which depends on random events. It is a mapping or a function from possible outcomes (e.g., the p ...
with
expected value
In probability theory, the expected value (also called expectation, expectancy, mathematical expectation, mean, average, or first moment) is a generalization of the weighted average. Informally, the expected value is the arithmetic mean of a ...
0 and
variance
In probability theory and statistics, variance is the expectation of the squared deviation of a random variable from its population mean or sample mean. Variance is a measure of dispersion, meaning it is a measure of how far a set of number ...
1.
[Dodge, Y. (2003) The Oxford Dictionary of Statistical Terms. OUP. ] Where collections of such random variables are used, there is often an associated (possibly unstated) assumption that members of such collections are
statistically independent.
Standard normal variables play a major role in theoretical statistics in the description of many types of models, particularly in
regression analysis
In statistical modeling, regression analysis is a set of statistical processes for estimating the relationships between a dependent variable (often called the 'outcome' or 'response' variable, or a 'label' in machine learning parlance) and one ...
, the
analysis of variance and
time series analysis
In mathematics, a time series is a series of data points indexed (or listed or graphed) in time order. Most commonly, a time series is a sequence taken at successive equally spaced points in time. Thus it is a sequence of discrete-time data. ...
.
When the term "deviate" is used, rather than "variable", there is a connotation that the value concerned is treated as the no-longer-random outcome of a standard normal random variable. The terminology here is the same as that for