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(I have asked this question in the math site, but think it might be more relevant here) I have been following the online MIT statistics course, and one course was about some fundamental distributions.(https://ocw.mit.edu/courses/mathematics/18-05-introduction-to-probability-and-statistics-spring-2014/readings/MIT18_05S14_Reading5c.pdf)

I read it a couple of times and did a lot of search online, but I still find it hard to fully grasp the idea of how to match different distributions to different real life scenarios.

For example, "Suppose we have a tape measure with markings at each millimeter. If we measure (to the nearest marking) the length of items that are roughly a meter long, the rounding error will uniformly distributed between -0.5 and 0.5 millimeters." I just cannot wrap my head around how it was determined that uniform distribution matches this case.

I'm wondering if there are some books/articles that give detailed and intuitive explanation of distributions and their real life applications?

kjetil b halvorsen
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ZEE
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    You might be better to ask about each distribution you are interested in separately (and tell us what you have found out and what you still need to clarify). – mdewey Aug 16 '17 at 17:13
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    Perhaps you should qualify your request with "apart from [Johnson and Kotz](https://www.amazon.com/Continuous-Univariate-Distributions-Probability-Statistics/dp/0471584959)," which is the bible of distributions. Although unfortunately priced, it's likely to be available in any stats-oriented library. – whuber Jan 18 '18 at 00:03

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