User talk:Shawn@garbett.org

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Wrapped normal
Just to note that I moved your contribution on the talk page of the stats project to the end of that page, in case you look for it, and I also copied it to Talk:Wrapped normal distribution, which is a better pace for it. Melcombe (talk) 10:15, 22 January 2010 (UTC)

Exponentially modified Gaussian distribution
You said
 * I see you're improving the EMG distribution page (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Exponentially_modified_Gaussian_distribution). I noticed there is another page of similar content, should it be changed to a redirect? http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Exponentially_Modified_Gaussian
 * Shawn@garbett.org (talk) 21:42, 23 January 2012 (UTC)

A redirect would be good, but it may be worth saving the figure which shows the "chromatography" notation. I notice that you had a comment about characteristic functions having been removed ... I haven't seen where these were, but it would be good to have a formula for the characteristic function. Melcombe (talk) 21:54, 23 January 2012 (UTC)

Your recent edits
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ExGaussian
Thank you for the kind words. Makes a nice change here :)

Yes I think it would be an EXCELLENT idea to park at least some of what you have found into WP. If you need this data the chances some one else will either now or at some point in the future. Its also a very good exercise - if you are not used to writing in English that is comphrensible to laymen - to summarise and explain these things. Experts can get away with shortened and abbrevated notes but if you are coming to a topic for the first time - as we all have to at some point WP is simply invaluable for this. WP has a place for all sorts of unusual stuff and anything in statistics is likely to be of some use to some one at some point.

In short if you could park some of your notes here I think you would be doing everyone a massive favour. DrMicro (talk) 16:03, 24 May 2012 (UTC)

Just a thought: Distributions are relatively easy to create - chose any two and convolute the them. Normalise them to unit area and you have a distribution. With estimates of the mean, median etc this is probably sufficient for a probability article. There are however IMHO at least three things that a statistics article on a distribution needs.

Firstly it is essential to include the basic facts about it - the mean, the median, the variance etc. These are all listed in the infoboxes for most (?all) of the distributions in WP. The second thing is a method of estimating the parameters of the distribution from a data set. The ExGaussian article now includes a method of estimating the main parameters with the method of moments. Maximum likelihood probably can provide better estimates (and confidence intervals) but the number of iterations required is much reduced if the initial estimates are reasonably close to the actual numbers. The third thing such an article needs is a section on examples of its occurrence and/or use. The second and third sections I have mentioned here is what a statistics article needs as opposed to a probability article. There are of course many other sections that can be in such an article - including (say) any known history relating to its origin. Please don't ever feel limited to the three proposed sections only. But these - I feel - are at the heart of any useful statistics article on a distribution and should always be present.

A suggestion: since you are doing the reading on a complex (sounding) distribution you might find it useful to browse briefly over Chebyshev's inequality as it might possible be of use to you. DrMicro (talk) 20:43, 24 May 2012 (UTC)