Numerical Characteristics of Random Variables

Once you know which values a random variable can take, the genuinely usable information is a handful of numbers: where it averages, how much it fluctuates, and how it moves together with other variables. This chapter starts with random variables and their distributions, then works through mathematical expectation, the expectation of the common distributions, and the applications of expectation, before turning to variance and standard deviation and to covariance and the correlation coefficient. It closes with exercises that mix all three families of numerical characteristics together.