Search results
Results From The WOW.Com Content Network
It is not immediately clear from the definition how exotic a distribution might be. To answer this question, it is instructive to see distributions built up from a smaller space, namely the space of continuous functions. Roughly, any distribution is locally a (multiple) derivative of a continuous function.
The mathematical sense of the term is from 1718. In the 18th century, the term chance was also used in the mathematical sense of "probability" (and probability theory was called Doctrine of Chances). This word is ultimately from Latin cadentia, i.e. "a fall, case".
In algebra and number theory, a distribution is a function on a system of finite sets into an abelian group which is analogous to an integral: it is thus the algebraic analogue of a distribution in the sense of generalised function. The original examples of distributions occur, unnamed, as functions φ on Q/Z satisfying [1]
Random variables are usually written in upper case Roman letters, such as or and so on. Random variables, in this context, usually refer to something in words, such as "the height of a subject" for a continuous variable, or "the number of cars in the school car park" for a discrete variable, or "the colour of the next bicycle" for a categorical variable.
The uniform distribution or rectangular distribution on [a,b], where all points in a finite interval are equally likely, is a special case of the four-parameter Beta distribution. The Irwin–Hall distribution is the distribution of the sum of n independent random variables, each of which having the uniform distribution on [0,1].
Antoine Augustin Cournot in 1843 was the first to use the term median (valeur médiane) for the value that divides a probability distribution into two equal halves. Other contributors to the theory of errors were Ellis (1844), De Morgan (1864), Glaisher (1872), and Giovanni Schiaparelli (1875).
This is a list of probability topics.It overlaps with the (alphabetical) list of statistical topics.There are also the outline of probability and catalog of articles in probability theory.
In mathematics, a formal distribution is an infinite sum of powers of a formal variable, usually denoted in the theory of formal distributions. The coefficients of these infinite sums can be many different mathematical structures, such as vector spaces or rings , but in applications most often take values in an algebra over a field .