Understanding Data Distributions

In this chapter, we examine the reasons why data distribute as observed. One can formulate a rigorous, formal theory of data analysis based on statistics and probability. Here, we concentrate on an intuitive explanation, leaving a more formal treatment to the following chapters and, for some of the more advanced topics, to specific courses. Here we introduce the concept of probability and the basic theory of probability. We define the moments of a statistical distribution. In particular, we define the most important ones such as expected value, variance and standard deviation. We study several important distributions, i.e. the uniform, binomial and Poisson distribution.