Probability Distributions

Abstract

Looking up probabilities once was a time-consuming, complex, and error-prone task. Virtually every statistics book has tables of various probability distributions in an appendix, but R provides a family of functions for both discrete and continuous probability functions, making the use of tables unnecessary. You have already seen the rnorm() function used to produce random numbers that simulate a normal distribution with a certain mean and standard deviation. The functions for other probability distributions are all similarly labeled to make it easy to remember them.