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This work includes a new characterization of the multivariate normal distribution. In particular, it is shown that a positive density function $f$ is Gaussian if and only if the $f(x+ y)/f(x)$ is convex in $x$ for every $y$. This result has…
The normal distribution has the unique property that the cumulant generating function has only two terms, namely those involving the mean and the variance. This property is used to construct a simple by using the log of the modulus of the…
The central limit theorem ensures that a sum of random variables tends to a Gaussian distribution as their total number tends to infinity. However, for a class of positive random variables, we find that the sum tends faster to a log-normal…
This paper presents an extensive survey of regular distributions in natural and social sciences. The survey includes studies from a wide scope of academic disciplines, in order to create an inventory of the different mathematical functions…
The notion of probability density for a random function is not as straightforward as in finite-dimensional cases. While a probability density function generally does not exist for functional data, we show that it is possible to develop the…
This paper describes the Difference-of-Log-Normals (DLN) distribution. A companion paper makes the case that the DLN is a fundamental distribution in nature, and shows how a simple application of the CLT gives rise to the DLN in many…
Some properties of the inverse of the Normal distribution are studied. Its derivatives, integrals and asymptotic behavior are presented.
It is well known that the independence of the sample mean and the sample variance characterizes the normal distribution. By using Anosov's theorem, we further investigate the analogous characteristic properties in terms of the sample mean…
Conventional wisdom assumes that the indefinite integral of the probability density function for the standard normal distribution cannot be expressed in finite elementary terms. While this is true, there is an expression for this…
By making use of the familiar Mathieu series and its generalizations, the authors derive a number of new integral representations and present a systematic study of probability density functions and probability distributions associated with…
In a recent article a generalization of the binomial distribution associated with a sequence of positive numbers was examined. The analysis of the nonnegativeness of the formal expressions was a key-point to allow to give them a statistical…
We present an identity for an unbiased estimate of a general statistical distribution. The identity computes the distribution density from dividing a histogram sum over a local window by a correction factor from a mean-force integral, and…
Probability distributions supported on the simplex enjoy a wide range of applications across statistics and machine learning. Recently, a novel family of such distributions has been discovered: the continuous categorical. This family enjoys…
Density deconvolution is the task of estimating a probability density function given only noise-corrupted samples. We can fit a Gaussian mixture model to the underlying density by maximum likelihood if the noise is normally distributed, but…
A family of consistent tests, derived from a characterization of the probability generating function, is proposed for assessing Poissonity against a wide class of count distributions, which includes some of the most frequently adopted…
The equipartition theorem states that inverse temperature equals the log-derivative of the density of states. This relation can be generalized by introducing a proportionality factor involving an increasing positive function phi(x). It is…
The purpose of the present paper is to give unified expressions to the characteristic functions of all elliptical and related distributions. Those distributions including the multivariate elliptical symmetric distributions and some…
Estimation of density functions supported on general domains arises when the data is naturally restricted to a proper subset of the real space. This problem is complicated by typically intractable normalizing constants. Score matching…
Probability density estimation is a classical and well studied problem, but standard density estimation methods have historically lacked the power to model complex and high-dimensional image distributions. More recent generative models…
In this work we study loss functions for learning and evaluating probability distributions over large discrete domains. Unlike classification or regression where a wide variety of loss functions are used, in the distribution learning and…