2.4 Fitting Distributions to Data

In Math104 you used knowledge of the experiment to choose the parameters for the distributions you used. For example, to fit a Binomial distribution to die rolls you assumed that $p=1/6$, i.e. a fair die. Similarly above we were working with know means and standard deviations to calculate probabilities for Normal distributions. In the remainder of this course we instead use the data we have accumulated to fit the best model for the data, i.e. use the data to get a best estimate of the parameter of interest in the population. This is known as inference.