Contribution to cover C++11 functionality
Joseph Rushton Wakeling via Digitalmars-d
digitalmars-d at puremagic.com
Thu Dec 1 05:42:32 PST 2016
On Wednesday, 30 November 2016 at 21:12:16 UTC, Ilya Yaroshenko
wrote:
> "random distribution" is like "accidental distribution".
Not really. I would use "randomly chosen distribution" for that.
> "random variable" is much more frequently used definition is
> stats world (stats world != stats packages). Also this better
> describes what functionality provides module. "Distribution"
> may be used for PDF or for CDF (or their pair). "probability
> distribution" and "random variable" looks better (IMHO) then
> "random distribution", which has another meaning in stats
> world: a distribution, which was chosen randomly from a class
> of distributions. For example, variance-mean mixtures. --Ilya
"Random variable" is obviously the strict mathematical term, but
there are a few reasons why "distribution" might be a better term
to use in the API:
* many users will not be statisticians; "distribution" is
likely to be
a more easily-understood term, while "variable" may confuse
some users
since it may be mixed up with 'variable' as in a program
variable;
* outside of mathematics many researchers use the term
"distribution"
quite casually and readily;
* the C++11 standard calls these entities distributions, so
calling the
D functionality by similar names allows for easy
understanding and
adaptation.
(Strictly speaking the C++11 standard uses 'distribution' to
refer to functors that take a source of uniformly-distributed
random bits as input, and use that to generate variates with
other statistical properties.)
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