ABSTRACT
This chapter considers continuous distributions where the random variable can take any value in some specified interval. It describes how observations on a continuous variate can be plotted as a histogram. From a mathematical point of view the cumulative distribution function is the best way of describing a distribution since it can be used for both discrete and continuous distributions. For discrete distributions it is a step function which increases from zero to one. However, the function is more useful for problems involving continuous variables, which are the concern of this chapter. Since, for continuous distributions, the probability of observing a single value is zero. The normal or Gaussian distribution is the most important of all the distributions since it has a wide range of practical applications. It is sometimes called the bell-shaped distribution, a name which aptly describes the characteristic shape of many distributions which occur in practice. The exponential distribution is another useful continuous distribution.
