The Concept of Distribution
chris Wild
The
University of
c.wild@auckland.ac.nz
ABSTRACT
This
paper is a personal exploration of where the ideas of “distribution” that we
are trying to develop in students come from and are leading to, how they fit
together, and where they are important and why. We need to have such
considerations in the back of our minds when designing learning experiences.
The notion of “distribution” as a lens through which statisticians look at the
variation in data is developed. I explore the sources of variation in data,
empirical versus theoretical distributions, the nature of statistical models, sampling
distributions, the conditional nature of distributions used for modelling, and
the underpinnings of inference.
Keywords: Frequency distributions,
Statistical models; Sampling distributions; Statistical inference; Types of
distribution; Variation
__________________________
Statistics Education Research
Journal, 5(2), 10-26, http://www.stat.auckland.ac.nz/serj
Ó International Association for
Statistical Education (IASE/ISI), November, 2006
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chris wild
Department of Statistics
Private Bag 92019