Canadian Medical Guide > Analytical, Diagnostic and Therapeutic Techniques and Equipment > Investigative Techniques > Epidemiologic Methods > Statistics > Statistical Distributions Terms and Definitions
Statistical Distributions
Medical Definition: | The complete summaries of the frequencies of the values or categories of a measurement made on a group of items, a population, or other collection of data. The distribution tells either how many or what proportion of the group was found to have each value (or each range of values) out of all the possible values that the quantitative measure can have. |
Guide Notes: | how many or what proportion of a group has a given value: read MeSH definition; GEN or unspecified: prefer specifics; IM; coord with subject of data /epidemiol or /statist (IM); DF: STATIST DISTRIBUTIONS |
Binomial Distribution - The probability distribution associated with two mutually exclusive outcomes; used to model cumulative incidence rates and prevalence rates. The Bernoulli distribution is a special case of binomial distribution. | |
Chi-Square Distribution - A distribution in which a variable is distributed like the sum of the the squares of any given independent random variable, each of which has a normal distribution with mean of zero and variance of one. The chi-square test is a statistical test based on comparison of a test statistic to a chi-square distribution. The oldest of these tests are used to detect whether two or more population distributions differ from one another. | |
Normal Distribution - Continuous frequency distribution of infinite range. Its properties are as follows: 1) continuous, symmetrical distribution with both tails extending to infinity; 2) arithmetic mean, mode, and median identical; and 3) shape completely determined by the mean and standard deviation. | |
Poisson Distribution - A distribution function used to describe the occurrence of rare events or to describe the sampling distribution of isolated counts in a continuum of time or space. |
Statistical Distributions Medical Definitions and Terms
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