Wikipedia talk:WikiProject Statistics

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Requested move at Talk:Relative change and difference#Requested move 24 September 2023

There is a requested move discussion at Talk:Relative change and difference#Requested move 24 September 2023 that may be of interest to members of this WikiProject. ModernDayTrilobite (talk • contribs) 14:36, 2 October 2023 (UTC)

Thread that also has statistics

Hello. There is a discussion at Wikipedia:Administrators' noticeboard#Many blocks shouldn't be indef, which has an element of statistics involved. Specifically it relates to calculation of the margin of error. If you are interested in providing input about how margin of error is calculated or the thread in general, you are welcome to join the discussion. Regards,--Thinker78 (talk) 21:13, 4 October 2023 (UTC)

Consistent notation of the quantile function

I noticed that different notations are used to denote the quantile function of probability distributions. The most common ones are $Q(p)$ (e.g. Tukey lambda distribution), $Q(u)$ (e.g. Dagum distribution), $F^{-1}(\cdot )$ (e.g. Kumaraswamy distribution), and $x(F)$ Laplace distribution. In other cases, the quantile function is redubbed as "random variate generation", and described as a transformation of a standard uniform random variable (rv), i.e. $U\mapsto X$ (e.g. Burr Type XII distribution).

Although I realize that this is similarly the case in the literature, I believe that arbitrarily inconsistent notation like this, can be very confusing to readers, especially newcomers. But unlike the published literature, here, the notation can be made consistent.

I don't have a strong preference myself, but I (usually) prefer $x(F)$ over $F^{-1}(\cdot )$ nowadays, since both $Q(\cdot )$ and $F^{-1}(\cdot )$ have no standard for the name of the parameter (I've seen $p$, $q$, $u$ and $y$ used in different places). I can also see that standard uniform transformation notation, e.g. $X=-\log(1-U)$ for the standard exponential distribution, could be a good choice, but only if it is described as being the "quantile function", and not only "random variate generation". jorenham (talk) 14:26, 14 December 2023 (UTC)

If we were going to try to standardise, I would prefer Q(u), particularly because it leads naturally to q(u) for the density quantile function. But note also that adopting a standard on Wikipedia would make it inconsistent with the way the quantile function is usually presented in the literature for some distributions. Newystats (talk) 02:34, 15 December 2023 (UTC)

Coupling the QF notation with that of the QDF makes sense to me.

I guess that notational inconsistency with the literature is inevitable. I even stumbled accross a $G(p)$ today (C.L. Mallows, '73).

Perhaps it's a good idea to explicitly list the common QF notations on the quantile function page? jorenham (talk) 02:54, 15 December 2023 (UTC)