shapes of uncertainty
Distributions.
The shapes uncertainty likes to take — bell, skew, spike, heavy tail.
28 live pieces
Normal distribution
Tune μ and σ; watch the bell shift and stretch against samples drawn live.
Poisson distribution
Count rare events with λ — and watch the bars converge to a Normal as λ grows.
Binomial distribution
n coins, probability p — see the discrete count distribution shift and stretch toward Gaussian.
Exponential distribution
Waiting times between Poisson events — and the only continuous memoryless distribution.
Beta distribution
A distribution over probabilities. The Bayesian conjugate prior for coin flips.
Cauchy distribution
An undefined mean, a meaningful median, and averages that retain the original heavy tails.
Geometric distribution
Count trials or failures until the first success; condition on the remaining wait.
Log-normal distribution
A normal logarithm gives a positive, skewed variable. Compare original and log scales and compute upper tails.
Uniform distribution
Equal-length intervals have equal probability. Compute areas and invert the cumulative scale.
Gamma distribution
Waiting time for k Poisson events. Shape k controls skew; rate λ controls scale.
Bernoulli distribution
An event as a zero-or-one indicator: its probability, variance, and estimated proportion.
Negative binomial
Flip until the r-th success. Dispersion that Poisson can’t match.
Hypergeometric distribution
Enumerate finite samples without replacement and compute how dependence changes the count.
Student's t distribution
Heavier tails than Normal at small ν. Shrinks to a Gaussian as degrees of freedom grow.
Chi-squared distribution
Sum of k squared standard normals. The engine of variance tests.
F distribution
Ratio of two chi-squareds. The ANOVA distribution.
Weibull distribution
Failure times. Shape k flips the hazard rate from falling to rising.
Pareto distribution
Power-law tails. The 80/20 rule lived on a log-log axis.
Laplace distribution
Two exponentials back-to-back. The prior behind L1 regularization.
Logistic distribution
Link continuous values, cumulative probabilities, odds, and quantiles.
Gumbel distribution
The distribution of maxima. Extreme-value theory in one curve.
Triangular distribution
Compare bounded models and sensitivity to minimum, mode, and maximum.
Dirichlet distribution
Learn category probabilities on a simplex and integrate their uncertainty into future counts.
Multivariate Normal
Connect covariance, conditional distributions, linear projections, and perfect-correlation limits.
Gaussian mixture
Two bells, one weight. Unmixes into components you can steer by hand.
Symmetric stable distributions
See how normalized sums retain their shape while ordinary averages shrink, hold, or widen.
Zipf distribution
Compare infinite rank probabilities with a finite cutoff, and inspect tail mass and moment thresholds.
Empirical CDF
Turn observations into exact cumulative probabilities, tied-value masses, and inverse quantiles.
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Planned topics (1)
These topics are on the editorial backlog. Publication dates are not set.
- Von Mises distribution