[R] identify the distribution of the data

[Richard O'Keefe]

fitdistrplus is a great package.
But the documentation for the fitdist function makes
something very clear:
  fitdistr(data, distr, ...)
    distr [is] A character string "name" naming a distribution
          for which the corresponding density function dname,
          the corresponding distribution function pname and the
          corresponding quantile function qname must be defined,
          or directly the density function.

That is, it fits the *parameters* of a distribution,
it does not infer the *form* of the distribution.
If you tell it 'distr = "norm"' it will fit a mean and
standard deviation.  It will not pick distr = "norm" by
itself, which is what I think the OP wanted.

descdist from that package will *help*, but its advice
is not infallible, and it considers a limited range of
distributions.  (It doesn't deal with circular ones,
for example.)

On Thu, 9 Feb 2023 at 20:10, PIKAL Petr <petr.pikal using precheza.cz> wrote:

> Hi
>
> Others gave you more fundamental answers. To check the possible
> distribution
> you could use package
>
> https://cran.r-project.org/web/packages/fitdistrplus/index.html
>
> Cheers
> Petr
>
> > -----Original Message-----
> > From: R-help <r-help-bounces using r-project.org> On Behalf Of Bogdan Tanasa
> > Sent: Wednesday, February 8, 2023 5:35 PM
> > To: r-help <r-help using r-project.org>
> > Subject: [R] identify the distribution of the data
> >
> > Dear all,
> >
> > I do have dataframes with numerical values such as 1,9, 20, 51, 100 etc
> >
> > Which way do you recommend to use in order to identify the type of the
> > distribution of the data (normal, poisson, bernoulli, exponential,
> log-normal etc
> > ..)
> >
> > Thanks so much,
> >
> > Bogdan
> >
> >       [[alternative HTML version deleted]]
> >
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