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If two variables are uncorrelated, there is no linear relationship between them. Uncorrelated random variables have a Pearson correlation coefficient, when it exists, of zero, except in the trivial case when either variable has zero variance (is a constant). In this case the correlation is undefined.
Students of statistics and probability theory sometimes develop misconceptions about the normal distribution, ideas that may seem plausible but are mathematically untrue. For example, it is sometimes mistakenly thought that two linearly uncorrelated, normally distributed random variables must be statistically independent.
A random variable with a Gaussian distribution is said to be normally distributed, and is called a normal deviate. Normal distributions are important in statistics and are often used in the natural and social sciences to represent real-valued random variables whose distributions are not known.
In general, random variables may be uncorrelated but statistically dependent. But if a random vector has a multivariate normal distribution then any two or more of its components that are uncorrelated are independent. This implies that any two or more of its components that are pairwise independent are independent.
A more general case of this concerns the distribution of the product of a random variable having a beta distribution with a random variable having a gamma distribution: for some cases where the parameters of the two component distributions are related in a certain way, the result is again a gamma distribution but with a changed shape parameter ...
This means that the sum of two independent normally distributed random variables is normal, with its mean being the sum of the two means, and its variance being the sum of the two variances (i.e., the square of the standard deviation is the sum of the squares of the standard deviations). [1]
Indeed, even when the random variable does not have a density, the characteristic function may be seen as the Fourier transform of the measure corresponding to the random variable. Another related concept is the representation of probability distributions as elements of a reproducing kernel Hilbert space via the kernel embedding of distributions .
The definition extends naturally to more than two random variables. We say that random variables , …, are i.i.d. if they are independent (see further Independence (probability theory) § More than two random variables) and identically distributed, i.e. if and only if