Question

Can someone kindly tell me what is the difference between normal distribution and poisson distribution in terms of mean median and mode.

Answer 1

normal has it all in the middle of the curve; poisson is a skewed left or right i believe

Answer 2

whats meant by skewed to the left or right?

Answer 3

a norm distrib has a nice looking bell shaped curve; but that aint the case for all data now is it?

Answer 4

i believe the poisson is designed after a skewed distribution; where the hump is towards the left or right of center

Answer 5

http://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=poisson

Answer 6

http://www.google.com/search?q=poisson+curve&um=1&ie=UTF-8&tbm=isch&source=og&sa=N&hl=en&tab=wi&biw=1024&bih=677

Answer 7

ok thanks, are there any tests which we can use to find if either the data is normally distributed or poisson distributed?

Answer 8

yep, as far as i can tell, you determine the datas central tendencies according to the mean; median, variance, etc

but even the most skewed datas can be massaged into a normla distribution

Answer 9

so the poisson and others like it arent used much in the stats class