Abstract
The normal or Gaussian distribution is the most widely used distribution in the field of statistics for 3 reasons: (1) numerous natural phenomena, or transformations of phenomena, are nearly normal, (2) sums of random variables from nonnormal distributions are near normal, and (3) the normal is the limiting distribution of many distributions (binomial, chi-square, Poisson, etc.).
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References
A handy, readable book is Hastings, N. A. J., and Peacock, J. B. 1974. Statistical Distributions. Most statistical texts discuss the commonly used distributions. The authoritative reference in this area is the 4-volume set by N. L. Johnson and S. Kotz, published by Wiley, New York, N.Y. All of them have the titleDistributions in Statistics with the following subtitles: Discrete Distributions (1969), Continuous Univariate Distributions (1970) (2 vols.), and Continuous Multivariate Distributions (1972).
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© 1986 Chapman and Hall
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Tietjen, G.L. (1986). Some Useful Distributions. In: A Topical Dictionary of Statistics. Springer, Boston, MA. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4613-1967-2_3
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4613-1967-2_3
Publisher Name: Springer, Boston, MA
Print ISBN: 978-1-4612-9168-8
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