Wednesday, June 5, 2013

The Ultimate Probability Distribution Explorer

To give it its full name, The Ultimate Univariate Probability Distribution Explorer is one of the (**free**) tools released recently by Wolfram  Research for use with their (**free**) CDF viewer.

First, what's CDF? This stands for "Computable Document Format", and I suggest you read my earlier posts on it, here and here. You can download the player using this link.

A post on the Wolfram blog alerted me to the availability of The Ultimate Univariate Probability Distribution Explorer, which is a CDF utility that you can download from here.

You can use this utility to explore the various properties of 500 univariate probability distributions.


From the Wolfram blog:
(There) "are about 60 properties. Multiplied by 500 probability distributions, this resulted in more than 30,000 formulas; 31,591, to be precise. (Not every property applies to every distribution; for example, the Cauchy distribution does not have higher moments due to its fat tail, and some properties cannot be expressed in closed form through named mathematical functions.) A typical mathematics handbook has at most 20 to 25 formulas per page (e.g. integrals that are displayed as multiline objects spanning more than a single line). This means that putting all these formulas into a book would easily give a 1,200-page book (even without including any of the plots of the distributions)....."
So, you've got a free, interactive, 1,200 page book. Not bad!

The wolfram blog post shows some nice screen-shots of TUUPDU in action.

I'm currently doing some work with the Topp-Leone distribution, and here is part of what TUUPDU can give me (remember, you can always click on the images to see larger ones):



and.....




and.......


I'm sure you get the picture!

Check it out for yourself - I think you'll find it very useful - and cheap!



© 2013, David E. Giles

3 comments:

  1. Dave, on a slightly related topic: how good do you find mathematica for econometrics? Have you ever used it to do a simple regression or anything more demanding?

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