Talk:Lévy distribution

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Contents 1 Nomenclature 2 Significance 3 Not very useful 4 Mathematical Mistake 5 Link to heavy tail

[edit] Nomenclature

Why is this sometimes called the Mandelbrot-Levy distribution? Did Mandelbrot, who has an air for publicity, simply append his name to something he studied? Or did he contribute something in this field? User:raylopez99 07:45, 12 September 2006 (UTC)

[edit] Significance

Can someone explain the significance of this? I mean, right now the page is nothing more than a definition, a not very informative comparison to other functions, and a ton of mathematical speak that anyone who's not a mathematician will understand. What is this function typically used for? What does it typically graph? etc. 66.189.210.56 06:06, 17 May 2007 (UTC)

[edit] Not very useful

This article is little more than showing off while explaining nothing. No one without a strong background in statistics can extract any meaning at all from it.

I agree. What the h*ll is an undefined excess kurtosis, anyway? How can you cook it? :D 83.59.187.193 13:17, 17 May 2007 (UTC)

This distribution was in the news this week in connection to an experiment about the flight patterns of fruit flies, http://www.foxnews.com/story/0,2933,272938,00.html

I had hoped to find an explanation of what significance this distribution has, but despite having taken 3 semesters of calculus in college I can't make heads nor tails out of this article.

The article is a pretty standard description of a probability distribution, offering the formulas for the common quantities of interest. More information is available at Lévy skew alpha-stable distribution, but there doesn't seem to be a really good definition of the utility of this distribution on wikipedia. You might also want to look at Lévy flight. digfarenough (talk) 20:56, 19 May 2007 (UTC)

I agree that this is an unusually unhelpful article that badly needs an introduction. Levy distribution crops up in all sorts of places (search flights of fruitflies and honeybees, for example) & the information here should be able to help people from those disciplines. At the moment it doesn't. Cooke 21:13, 11 November 2007 (UTC)

Instead of complaining, why don't you become an editor? I put together most of this article simply because it was one of the analytically expressible cases of the more general Lévy skew alpha-stable distribution, so I am quite sure it is useful, but I never researched specifically how it was useful. Stop complaining and start editing! PAR 21:47, 11 November 2007 (UTC)

[edit] Mathematical Mistake

The Characteristic function described in the text and one in the table that summarize the properties of the distribution are different. One of the two must be wrong. Could someone tell us which one is the right one?

No, they agree. Note that the one in the text includes a shift parameter μ which is not included in the function in the table. Since the function in the table says the support is [0,infinity), substitute μ=0 in the text function, which yields the function from the table. digfarenough (talk) 18:42, 20 July 2007 (UTC)

[edit] Link to heavy tail

The link to heavy-tails goes to long-rage dependency. Would it not be better to send it to the article on heavy-tailed distributions. Although that article is more mathematical, it will asist the reader who wants to know more. PoochieR (talk) 09:34, 24 January 2008 (UTC)