Probability distributions

In this section, we very briefly examine important distributions for common statistical problems with data consisting of quantities: the normal distribution and Student's t-distributions. We first introduce the idea of distributions with a discrete uniform distribution. We conclude with binomial distribution. We will try to be as non-technical as possible in this introduction to allow readers without statistical knowledge to follow easily; however, don't worry, we will be highly technical when explaining how to build functions that estimate correlations and regression coefficients.

Introducing probability distributions

Here, we introduce the idea of distributions using discrete uniform and binomial distributions.

Discrete uniform distribution

You might remember that, in Chapter 2, Visualizing and manipulating data using R, we examined outcomes of the roulette game. We showed that each of the 37 numbers (0 to 36) in European roulette has an equal probability of occurring...