Re: [libreoffice-users] Frequency Distribution

At 08:08 08/05/2017 -0600, Jorge Rodríguez wrote:
> Hi Brian, well, thank you for your answer

My point, of course, was that it was sufficient - 
indeed, better - to explain that you had a table 
with consecutive integers in one column and real 
values in the other, rather than listing 
eighty-two values and asking readers to make that observation themselves.

At 14:10 07/05/2017 -0600, Jorge Rodríguez wrote:
> If I have a number of data about some topic, how 
> can I get the type of distribution using the 
> LibreOffice's formula ? How can I know if it is 
> normal, gamma, etc. ? There is a way ?

The simple answer is that your data will 
certainly match none of those distributions - at least, not precisely.

Think of a straight line: this can be defined 
exactly by two points. If you have three points, 
they will not - except by an impossible 
coincidence - lie on a straight line. But if you 
believe that your data should lie on a straight 
line, there are techniques that determine the 
straight line which probably misses all of your 
points but is in some sense the "best fit" to them.

Similarly, your analytic distributions will be 
definable by a small number of points - certainly 
a lot less than your forty-one. So the best you 
can do is to attempt to fit various distributions 
to your data and also to discover how good the 
fit is in each case. That might help you to see 
which distribution the data fits best. But a 
better logic would be to decide from the nature 
of your data - what it represents - which 
distribution is likely, and then to fit the data 
to such a distribution (if that is necessary).

In any case, Calc does not appear to have any 
functionality that would help you here, but you 
will certainly be able to build formulae to 
achieve what you want in Calc once you have 
unearthed the relevant mathematics. That will surely be out there on the web.

I trust this helps.

Brian Barker


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