Think Bayes

Chapter 2. Computational Statistics

Distributions

In statistics a distribution is a set of values and their corresponding probabilities.

For example, if you roll a six-sided die, the set of possible values is the numbers 1 to 6, and the probability associated with each value is 1/6.

As another example, you might be interested in how many times each word appears in common English usage. You could build a distribution that includes each word and how many times it appears.

To represent a distribution in Python, you could use a dictionary that maps from each value to its probability. I have written a class called Pmf that uses a Python dictionary in exactly that way, and provides a number of useful methods. I called the class Pmf in reference to a probability mass function, which is a way to represent a distribution mathematically.

Pmf is defined in a Python module I wrote to accompany this book, thinkbayes.py. You can download it from http://thinkbayes.com/thinkbayes.py. For more information see “Working with the code”.

To use Pmf you can import it like this:

from thinkbayes import Pmf

The following code builds a Pmf to represent the distribution of outcomes for a six-sided die:

pmf = Pmf()
for x in [1,2,3,4,5,6]:
    pmf.Set(x, 1/6.0)

Pmf creates an empty Pmf with no values. The Set method sets the probability associated with each value to .

Here’s another example that counts the number of times each ...