[SciPy-User] Wording question regarding to distributions

[David Warde-Farley]

On 14-Jan-10, at 5:30 PM, Gökhan Sever wrote:

> Hello,
>
> What is the right way to express:
>
> Do we fit data to a distribution or distribution to data?
>
> Thanks.

I would say the latter. Assuming we are talking about the same  
scenario, the data follow some unknown distribution, which you try to  
approximate with some parametric form using maximum likelihood  
estimators and such. So you are fitting a (particular) distribution  
(or more specifically, a model of the underlying process which *uses*  
that particular distribution) to observed data.

My $0.02,

David