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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 small x. Hence, the integral of a bell-shaped function is typically a sigmoid ...
A normal distribution is sometimes informally called a bell curve. [8] However, many other distributions are bell-shaped ... In probability theory, ...
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".
Considerations of the shape of a distribution arise in statistical data analysis, where simple quantitative descriptive statistics and plotting techniques such as histograms can lead on to the selection of a particular family of distributions for modelling purposes. The normal distribution, often called the "bell curve" Exponential distribution
The normal distribution, also called the Gaussian or the bell curve. It is ubiquitous in nature and statistics due to the central limit theorem : every variable that can be modelled as a sum of many small independent, identically distributed variables with finite mean and variance is approximately normal.
Figure 1. A simple bimodal distribution, in this case a mixture of two normal distributions with the same variance but different means. The figure shows the probability density function (p.d.f.), which is an equally-weighted average of the bell-shaped p.d.f.s of the two normal distributions.
In general, a sigmoid function is monotonic, and has a first derivative which is bell shaped. Conversely, the integral of any continuous, non-negative, bell-shaped function (with one local maximum and no local minimum, unless degenerate) will be sigmoidal. Thus the cumulative distribution functions for many common probability distributions are ...
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 .