Ad
related to: how to find gamma values in excel spreadsheet examples with data sets
Search results
Results From The WOW.Com Content Network
The gamma function is an important special function in mathematics. Its particular values can be expressed in closed form for integer and half-integer arguments, but no simple expressions are known for the values at rational points in general. Other fractional arguments can be approximated through efficient infinite products, infinite series ...
In Bayesian inference, the gamma distribution is the conjugate prior to many likelihood distributions: the Poisson, exponential, normal (with known mean), Pareto, gamma with known shape σ, inverse gamma with known shape parameter, and Gompertz with known scale parameter.
The gamma function then is defined in the complex plane as the analytic continuation of this integral function: it is a meromorphic function which is holomorphic except at zero and the negative integers, where it has simple poles. The gamma function has no zeros, so the reciprocal gamma function 1 / Γ(z) is an entire function.
Since many distributions commonly used for parametric models in survival analysis (such as the exponential distribution, the Weibull distribution and the gamma distribution) are special cases of the generalized gamma, it is sometimes used to determine which parametric model is appropriate for a given set of data. [1] Another example is the half ...
The sum of n exponential (β) random variables is a gamma (n, β) random variable. Since n is an integer, the gamma distribution is also a Erlang distribution. The sum of the squares of N standard normal random variables has a chi-squared distribution with N degrees of freedom.
The reciprocal is sometimes used as a starting point for numerical computation of the gamma function, and a few software libraries provide it separately from the regular gamma function. Karl Weierstrass called the reciprocal gamma function the "factorielle" and used it in his development of the Weierstrass factorization theorem.
Thus computing the gamma function becomes a matter of evaluating only a small number of elementary functions and multiplying by stored constants. The Lanczos approximation was popularized by Numerical Recipes , according to which computing the gamma function becomes "not much more difficult than other built-in functions that we take for granted ...
Repeated application of the recurrence relation for the lower incomplete gamma function leads to the power series expansion: [2] (,) = = (+) (+) = = (+ +). Given the rapid growth in absolute value of Γ(z + k) when k → ∞, and the fact that the reciprocal of Γ(z) is an entire function, the coefficients in the rightmost sum are well-defined, and locally the sum converges uniformly for all ...