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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.
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.
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".
When the larger values tend to be farther away from the mean than the smaller values, one has a skew distribution to the right (i.e. there is positive skewness), one may for example select the log-normal distribution (i.e. the log values of the data are normally distributed), the log-logistic distribution (i.e. the log values of the data follow ...
The shape of a distribution will fall somewhere in a continuum where a flat distribution might be considered central and where types of departure from this include: mounded (or unimodal), U-shaped, J-shaped, reverse-J shaped and multi-modal. [1]
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 .
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.