Basic Terminology of Probability Distributions
There are two families of methods in statistics: parametric and non-parametric methods. Non-parametric methods are meant to deal with data that could take any shape. Parametric methods, by contrast, make assumptions about the particular shape that data takes on. These assumptions are often encoded as parameters. The following are the two main parameters that you should be aware of:
Mean: This is the average of all values in the distribution.
Standard Deviation: This is the measure of the spread of values around the mean of a distribution.
Most of the parametric methods in statistics depend in some way on those two parameters. The parametric distributions that we're going to study in this chapter are these:
Uniform distributions
Normal distributions
Log-normal distributions.
Binomial distributions
Poisson distributions
Pareto distributions
Uniform Distribution
In the uniform distribution, all values between an interval, let's say [a,b], are equiprobable...