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.)
