Book Image

Mastering Python for Data Science

By : Samir Madhavan
Book Image

Mastering Python for Data Science

By: Samir Madhavan

Overview of this book

Table of Contents (19 chapters)
Mastering Python for Data Science
Credits
About the Author
About the Reviewers
www.PacktPub.com
Preface
7
Estimating the Likelihood of Events
Index

Various forms of distribution


There are various kinds of probability distributions, and each distribution shows the probability of different outcomes for a random experiment. In this section, we'll explore the various kinds of probability distributions.

A normal distribution

A normal distribution is the most common and widely used distribution in statistics. It is also called a "bell curve" and "Gaussian curve" after the mathematician Karl Friedrich Gauss. A normal distribution occurs commonly in nature. Let's take the height example we saw previously. If you have data for the height of all the people of a particular gender in Hong Kong city, and you plot a bar chart where each bar represents the number of people at this particular height, then the curve that is obtained will look very similar to the following graph. The numbers in the plot are the standard deviation numbers from the mean, which is zero. The concept will become clearer as we proceed through the chapter.

Also, if you take an...