[R] Re Off topic - Compendium of distributions

Charlotte Maia maiagx at gmail.com
Fri Dec 4 05:52:22 CET 2009


Hi,

I am going to sound mean here, however I don't feel the document is
"very comprehensive". Maybe concise is a better word.

I quickly looked through the document.

The biggest problem is that there is very little discussion on
multivariate distributions. Noting that multivariate distributions
play a critical role in statistical theory, plus are gaining an
increasing number of applications in various fields.

I saw no discussion of distributions with circular, cylindrical, or
spherical sample spaces (and for that matter the descriptions of
bounded and unbounded are wrong).
No discussion of copulas and no discussion of distributions that mix
discrete and continuous random variables.

Plus despite saying that your organisation supports nonparametric
approaches, there was no obvious serious examples (maybe they are
hidden in there somewhere...).

It's important to note that as this is an R mailing list, many readers
will have degrees in computer science, mathematics and statistics.
Plus many will have looked at CRANs task view for distributions. I'd
be surprised if there are many readers who are not already familiar
with basic distributions such as normal, univariate, etc.

Perhaps for people that have done one, maybe two, statistics courses
at university, and majored in something entirely different, they very
well may be quite impressed.

Whilst this post is critical, I genuinely wish you the best of luck
with your business, I hope your stakeholders and clientele are
impressed by it.


regards
-- 
Charlotte Maia
http://sites.google.com/site/maiagx/home

(This is a response to website, not the MIME digest).




More information about the R-help mailing list