Steinar H. Gunderson wrote:
> On Mon, Sep 08, 2008 at 12:12:33PM -0500, Chris Caldwell wrote:
>> A common mistake is to use the mean of the Poisson distribution as if it
>> were a separator between occurrences, rather than just a mean
>> difference. So they try to add something to the last occurrence,
>> forgetting all of the other data points. Also this mean is not a mean
>> from a normal distribution: long and short gaps are not symmetrically
>> distributed.
>
> Hm, I thought that the negative exponential distribution (which governs the
> waiting time between events in a Poisson process -- the Poisson distribution
> represents the counts in a given interval) was "without memory" and so the
> distinction was unimportant? Ie. you come to the bus stop and the bus is 15
> minutes away on average; you wait for five minutes with no bus, and it's
> _still_ 15 minutes away on average :-)
That's not what "memoryless stochatastic process" means. It means
that, if the mean is 15 minutes, but the bus was 25 minutes late,
that the next bus is still 15 minutes way (on average). It means
sorta the same thing as independence.
Mike
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