Statistical Inference, Exploratory Data Analysis, and the Data Science Process - Doing Data Science - page 31

2

− x − μ

1

2 σ 2

N x μ , σ ∼ e

σ 2 π

The parameter μ is the mean and median and controls where the dis‐
tribution is centered (because this is a symmetric distribution), and
the parameter σ controls how spread out the distribution is. This is
the general functional form, but for specific real-world phenomenon,
these parameters have actual numbers as values, which we can estimate
from the data.

Figure 2-1. A bunch of continuous density functions (aka probability
distributions)