An R Introduction to Statistics

Probability Distributions

fractal-05h A probability distribution describes how the values of a random variable is distributed. For example, the collection of all possible outcomes of a sequence of coin tossing is known to follow the binomial distribution. Whereas the means of sufficiently large samples of a data population are known to resemble the normal distribution. Since the characteristics of these theoretical distributions are well understood, they can be used to make statistical inferences on the entire data population as a whole.

In the following tutorials, we demonstrate how to compute a few well-known probability distributions that occurs frequently in statistical study. We reference them quite often in other sections.