May, 2016


24
May 16

Visualising random variables, Terence Tao style

Recently mathematician Terence Tao posted some ruminations on how to visualize the different values a random variable could take. He created some basic animated loops that cycled through some samples from the distribution, and proposed a way to represent conditionality as well.

I liked the idea so much I’ve added it to my probability distributions JS library. The numbers can be shown directly, or interpreted as waiting times where each arrival is shown with a flashing symbol.

For documentation and examples see http://statisticsblog.com/probability-distributions/#visualize

If you use this feature do me a favor and let me know.