From: John Maddock (john_at_[hidden])
Date: 2006-07-11 12:26:01
Paul A Bristow wrote:
> What about the Qs? (complements)
>
>> As I mentioned before, these should be member functions,
>> which could be called "density" (also called 'mass')
Or distribution :-)
>> and "cumulative".
>
> OHOH many books don't mention either of these words!
>
> The whole nomenclature seems a massive muddle,
> with mathematicians, statistics, and users or all sorts using
> different
> terms
> and everyone thinks they are the 'Standard' :-(
>
> And the highest priority in my book is the END USERS,
> not the professionals.
>
>> The cumulative density function is a strictly increasing
>> function and
>> therefore can be inverted. The inverse function could be called
>> "inverse_cumulative", which is a completely unambiguous name.
>
> But excessively long :-(
True, how about "persentile", or is that to ambiguous?
>> Finally, you observe that it is often useful to specify the
>> cumulative
>> probability for a given value of the random variable and
>> solve for the
>> parameter (the "degrees of freedom" for a Students T
>> distribution) that
>> determines the distribution. Since each family of
>> distributions depends
>> on a different set of parameters (for example, normal distributions
>> depend on two parameters, the mean and variance), the
>> interface for this is trickier to define.
>
>> I can think of two possibilities (I prefer the first):
>>
>> 1) Define ad hoc inverse functions for each specific
>> distribution. So
>> for the Students T distribution, you would define a member
>> function of the form:
>>
>> double degrees_of_freedom(double cumulative_probability, double
>> random_variable) const;
>
> I don't like 2 either, so I have snipped it ;-)
>
> This seems OK to me.
That could be a static member function, since we're solving for the degrees
of freedom parameter. It would also be more natural to me for the
cumulative_probability parameter to come last in the list.
> I'd be grateful if you could sketch out how you see the whole
> Student's t class would look (just for double and omit the equations
> of course). (This will avoid any confusion about what we are talking
> about).
>
> However:
>
> But I still worried that the whole scheme will lead to much bigger
> code compared to a set of names of (template) functions
> (because code that isn't in fact used will be generated).
> Can anyone advise on this?
For template classes member functions are only instantiated when used, so if
you only use one member, then that's the only one instantiated.
John.