Fat-tailed distributionA fat-tailed distribution is a probability distribution that exhibits a large skewness or kurtosis, relative to that of either a normal distribution or an exponential distribution. In common usage, the terms fat-tailed and heavy-tailed are sometimes synonymous; fat-tailed is sometimes also defined as a subset of heavy-tailed. Different research communities favor one or the other largely for historical reasons, and may have differences in the precise definition of either.
Inverse-gamma distributionIn probability theory and statistics, the inverse gamma distribution is a two-parameter family of continuous probability distributions on the positive real line, which is the distribution of the reciprocal of a variable distributed according to the gamma distribution. Perhaps the chief use of the inverse gamma distribution is in Bayesian statistics, where the distribution arises as the marginal posterior distribution for the unknown variance of a normal distribution, if an uninformative prior is used, and as an analytically tractable conjugate prior, if an informative prior is required.
Pearson distributionThe Pearson distribution is a family of continuous probability distributions. It was first published by Karl Pearson in 1895 and subsequently extended by him in 1901 and 1916 in a series of articles on biostatistics. The Pearson system was originally devised in an effort to model visibly skewed observations. It was well known at the time how to adjust a theoretical model to fit the first two cumulants or moments of observed data: Any probability distribution can be extended straightforwardly to form a location-scale family.
Stable distributionIn probability theory, a distribution is said to be stable if a linear combination of two independent random variables with this distribution has the same distribution, up to location and scale parameters. A random variable is said to be stable if its distribution is stable. The stable distribution family is also sometimes referred to as the Lévy alpha-stable distribution, after Paul Lévy, the first mathematician to have studied it. Of the four parameters defining the family, most attention has been focused on the stability parameter, (see panel).
Characteristic function (probability theory)In probability theory and statistics, the characteristic function of any real-valued random variable completely defines its probability distribution. If a random variable admits a probability density function, then the characteristic function is the Fourier transform of the probability density function. Thus it provides an alternative route to analytical results compared with working directly with probability density functions or cumulative distribution functions.
