IECM 12.0 beta User Manual > Introduction to Uncertainty Analysis > Encoding Uncertainties as Probability Distributions > Judgments about Uncertainties >

Representativeness

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Representativeness has also been termed the "law of small numbers." People may tend to assume that the behavior they observe in a small set of data must be representative of the behavior of the system, which may not be completely characterized until substantially more data are collected. Thus, one should be cautious in inferring patterns from data with a small number of samples.