
Statistics • 203
01234
0.0
0.2
0.4
0.6
0.8
FIGURE6.3
e exponential distribution is usually used to describe the time or length between indepen-
dent events that occur at a constant rate. For example, if a customer has not been through
your door for an hour, the average time until the next customer arrives will be shorter than
if you just had a customer walk through, all else being equal. Because more customers arrive
at some times than others, this distribution only works well for homogenous chunks of time
(e.g., from 2:00 to 4:00 pm rather than one lunch hour and one non-lunch hour). Note that
the number of possibilities is not nite, so the ...