Probability distributions and their practical applications

February 19, 2015 1:19 PM

I am looking for a resource that lists probability distributions and their common real-world applications. For example, I'd expect to see: Lognormal - daily returns in the stock market. Poisson - failure rates for mechanical equipment, ...

The closest I can find is this wiki entry. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_probability_distributions

Ideally this would be a handbook which includes applications in as many fields as possible (biology, actuarial, physics, etc.) Does this resource exist?

posted by wivy to Education (6 answers total)

Does it exist? Probably not. You could hardly list all the situations in which observations are taken to be Normally distributed. Poisson distributions are use for random arrivals of everything from atomic particles to bank customers.
posted by SemiSalt at 5:13 PM on February 19, 2015 [1 favorite]

You can model a temperate coastal flat(ish) terrain wind speed model reasonably well with a Weibull distribution, but it's an approximation and doesn't apply to all sites.

(I've seen works claim that it's a physical law, but they are misinformed )
posted by scruss at 6:44 PM on February 19, 2015

You could try looking through the problem sets from the appropriate sections of a college-level probability textbook, such as the one by Sheldon Ross.
posted by alphanerd at 5:20 AM on February 20, 2015

I always liked the image of a poisson process of raindrops falling on a block of sidewalk or into a cup.
posted by mgogol at 12:25 PM on February 20, 2015

Response by poster: It looks like I'm going to have to make this resource. Stay tuned...
posted by wivy at 4:54 PM on February 23, 2015 [1 favorite]

Search Pinterest for what you want. There are many infographics and educational resources listed there. It's not just for crafts, fashion, and recipes.
posted by cross_impact at 1:23 PM on February 24, 2015