probability distributions

How Not To Draw a Probability Distribution

March 7, 2012 | Isomorphismes

If I google for “probability distribution” I find the following extremely bad picture: It’s bad because it conflates ideas and oversimplifies how variable probability distributions can generally be. Most distributions are not unimodal. Most dist... [Read more...]

Example 8.28: should we buy snowstorm insurance?

February 28, 2011 | Nick Horton

It's been a long winter so far in New England, with many a snow storm. In this entry, we consider a simulation to complement the analytic solution for a probability problem concerning snow. Consider a company that buys a policy to insure its revenue ...

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R and Tolerance Intervals

April 19, 2010 | Ralph

Confidence intervals and prediction intervals are used by statisticians on a regular basis. Another useful interval is the tolerance interval that describes the range of values for a distribution with confidence limits calculated to a particular percentile of the distribution. The R package tolerance can be used to create a ... [Read more...]

Example 7.25: compare draws with distribution

March 5, 2010 | Ken Kleinman

In example 7.24, we demonstrated a Metropolis-Hastings algorithm for generating observations from awkward distributions. In such settings it is desirable to assess the quality of draws by comparing them with the target distribution.Recall that the dis...

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Example 7.17: The Smith College diploma problem

November 12, 2009 | Nick Horton

Smith College is a residential women's liberal arts college in Northampton, MA that is steeped in tradition. One such tradition is to give each student at graduation a diploma at random (or more accurately, in a haphazard fashion). At the end of the ceremony, a diploma circle is formed, and ...

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Example 7.7: Tabulate binomial probabilities

July 25, 2009 | Ken Kleinman

Suppose we wanted to assess the probability P(X=x) for a binomial random variate with n = 10 and with p = .81, .84, ..., .99. This could be helpful, for example, in various game settings. In SAS, we ﬁnd the probability that X=x using differences in t...

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Book excerpts now posted

July 18, 2009 | Nick Horton

We've posted excerpts from the book on the book website. The excerpts include Chapter 3 (regression and ANOVA) in its entirety. This demonstrates how the entries (the generic descriptions of software functions) and the worked examples reinforce each ...