Multivariate Probability Distributions in R

This chapter will introduce you to the most important and widely used multivariate probability distribution, the multivariate normal. You will learn how to generate random samples from a multivariate normal distribution and how to calculate and plot the densities and probabilities under this distribution. You will also learn how to test if a dataset follows multivariate normality.

This chapter introduces a host of probability distributions to model non-normal data. In particular, you will be introduced to multivariate t-distributions, which can model heavier tails and are a generalization of the univariate Student's t-distribution. You will be introduced to various skew distributions, which are specifically designed to model data that are right or left skewed.

In the final chapter, you will be introduced to techniques for analyzing high dimensional data, including principal component analysis (PCA) and multidimensional scaling (MDS). You will also learn to implement these techniques by analyzing data.