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An S4 class to represent a discrete distribution with finite support

Source: R/ddf-class.R
ddf-class.Rd

A discrete distribution with finite support is here represented by its probability mass function (PMF). For this, it has one slot which stores the support of the PMF as a numeric vector and another slot for storing the value of the PMF at the corresponding point in the support. There is one further slot for a description.

Details

New ddf objects are checked for validity to ensure that they fulfill basic properties of a discrete probability distribution with finite support. The relevant checks for this are:

  • Support and probability vectors must have the same length.

  • All probabilities have to lie between 0 (excluded) and 1 (included). Here, 0 is not included as elements of the support have, by definition, non-zero probability.

  • The probabilities have to sum up to approximately 1. Currently the tolerance for this is set to 1e-10.

Slots

supp

A numeric vector, the support.

probs

A numeric vector, the corresponding probabilities.

desc

A character, a short description of the discrete distribution.