Equation 25 · Why Average Success Rate Hides the Failures That Matter Most
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A bound is not an estimate, though, and an operator usually needs more than an upper limit — they need to know roughly what the rate actually is, which requires observing the event itself, repeatedly, rather than merely failing to observe it. For a Poisson-distributed count of k observed tail events, the relative standard error of the resulting rate estimate scales as 1/ , so getting a usably precise estimate — a relative error in the neighbourhood of 20 to 25 percent, comparable to observing on the order of twenty events — requires
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