Location-scale Family - Converting A Single Distribution To A Location-scale Family

Converting A Single Distribution To A Location-scale Family

The following shows how to implement a location-scale family in a statistical package or programming environment where only functions for the "standard" version of a distribution are available. It is designed for R but should generalize to any language and library.

The example here is of the Student's t-distribution, which is normally provided in R only in its standard form, with a single degrees of freedom parameter df. The versions below with _ls appended show how to generalize this to encompass an arbitrary location parameter mu and scale parameter sigma.

Probability density function (PDF): dt_ls(x, df, mu, sigma) = 1/sigma * dt((x - mu)/sigma, df)
Cumulative distribution function (CDF): pt_ls(x, df, mu, sigma) = pt((x - mu)/sigma, df)
Quantile function (inverse CDF): qt_ls(prob, df, mu, sigma) = qt(prob, df)*sigma + mu
Generate a random variate: rt_ls(df, mu, sigma) = rt(df)*sigma + mu

Note that the generalized functions do not have standard deviation sigma since the standard t distribution does not have standard deviation 1.

Read more about this topic:  Location-scale Family

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