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Logs, Tails, Long Tails – Ryan Moulton's Articles

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Learn the shape of the logs of probability distributions, and you’ll be able to guess how they behave.

Gaussian Guessing Game Guess which of these graphs shows the normal/gaussian distribution. A B C D The correct answer is A. The rest are the logistic, cauchy, and beta distributions respectively. Even if you picked it out correctly, it isn’t easy to figure out. All of them look like “bell curves,” they are all symmetric, they all taper off at what looks like a similar rate. In that case, why do we care about the difference between them? Why don’t we just pick whichever one is most mathematically convenient and not worry about it? The difference lies in their tails, the parts of the graph where

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