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The Gaussian function is the archetypal example of a bell shaped function. A bell-shaped function or simply 'bell curve' is a mathematical function having a characteristic "bell"-shaped curve. These functions are typically continuous or smooth, asymptotically approach zero for large negative/positive x, and have a single, unimodal maximum at ...
The graph of a Gaussian is a characteristic symmetric "bell curve" shape. The parameter a is the height of the curve's peak, b is the position of the center of the peak, and c (the standard deviation, sometimes called the Gaussian RMS width) controls the width of the "bell".
In the bottom-right graph, smoothed profiles of the previous graphs are rescaled, superimposed and compared with a normal distribution (black curve). Main article: Central limit theorem The central limit theorem states that under certain (fairly common) conditions, the sum of many random variables will have an approximately normal distribution.
Gosset worked at the Guinness Brewery in Dublin, Ireland, and was interested in the problems of small samples – for example, the chemical properties of barley where sample sizes might be as few as 3. Gosset's paper refers to the distribution as the "frequency distribution of standard deviations of samples drawn from a normal population".
The exponentially modified normal distribution is another 3-parameter distribution that is a generalization of the normal distribution to skewed cases. The skew normal still has a normal-like tail in the direction of the skew, with a shorter tail in the other direction; that is, its density is asymptotically proportional to for some positive .
A different technique, which goes back to Laplace (1812), [3] is the following. Let = =. Since the limits on s as y → ±∞ depend on the sign of x, it simplifies the calculation to use the fact that e −x 2 is an even function, and, therefore, the integral over all real numbers is just twice the integral from zero to infinity.
The Pareto distribution, named after the Italian civil engineer, economist, and sociologist Vilfredo Pareto, [2] is a power-law probability distribution that is used in description of social, quality control, scientific, geophysical, actuarial, and many other types of observable phenomena; the principle originally applied to describing the distribution of wealth in a society, fitting the trend ...
The abundance of the theorems and identities inherited from Fourier series make the Chebyshev polynomials important tools in numeric analysis; for example they are the most popular general purpose basis functions used in the spectral method, [16] often in favor of trigonometric series due to generally faster convergence for continuous functions ...