In article <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>,
Glen <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
>"Chia C Chong" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote in message
>news:<a5g27d$e57$[EMAIL PROTECTED]>...
>> Hi!
>> I have a set of random numbers and if I know their expectation/mean, would
>> it be possible to deduce a PDF to describe the distribution of them?
>Knowing the mean tells you (almost) nothing about the form of the PDF.
Even knowing much more does not tell you that much.
While the normal distribution is determined by its
moments, and the CDF, much more stable than the PDF,
is .5 at the mean, the first 20 moments do not fix
it between 1/3 and 2/3.
--
This address is for information only. I do not claim that these views
are those of the Statistics Department or of Purdue University.
Herman Rubin, Dept. of Statistics, Purdue Univ., West Lafayette IN47907-1399
[EMAIL PROTECTED] Phone: (765)494-6054 FAX: (765)494-0558
=================================================================
Instructions for joining and leaving this list, remarks about the
problem of INAPPROPRIATE MESSAGES, and archives are available at
http://jse.stat.ncsu.edu/
=================================================================
