BIMODAL DISTRIBUTIONS FOR THE UNDERGRADUATE STATISTICS CURRICULUM
Keywords:
bigdata, Apache Spark, kernel density estimates, bimodal distributions, excess mass test, statistics curriculumDOI:
https://doi.org/10.17654/0972361723003Abstract
Bimodal data arises from various sources in different disciplines, including but not limited to financial, medical, environmental, technological, social, and educational fields. However, one of the biggest challenges undergraduate students across various disciplines face in modeling and analyzing these data is the lack of flexible bimodal distributions that could capture patterns. Although statistics programs are aware of the importance of bimodal data, most undergraduate textbooks lack bimodal distributions in their contents. Including these distributions in the curriculum would provide students with the tools needed to analyze bimodal data and enrich mathematical statistics courses. This paper introduces existing univariate bimodal probability distributions for modeling these types of data efficiently in an undergraduate curriculum. Those distributions are flexible and in closed form. Some examples, using real-world data, are presented to demonstrate the importance of these distributions.
Received: June 26, 2022; Accepted: August 1, 2022; Published: December 19, 2022
References
L. Arthur, From performativity to professionalism: lecturers' responses to student feedback, Teaching in Higher Education 14(4) (2009), 441-454.
H. Azzalini and A. W. Bowman, A look at some data on the old faithful geyser, Journal of the Royal Statistical Society, Series C 39(3) (1990), 357-365.
S. L. Crawford, An application of the Laplace method to finite mixture distributions, J. Amer. Statist. Assoc. 89(425) (1994), 259-267.
C. G. Cegielski and L. A. Jones-Farmer, Knowledge, skills, and abilities for entry-level business analytics positions: a multi-method study, Decision Sciences Journal of Innovative Education 14 (2016), 91-118.
T. Crews and J. Butterfield, Data for flipped classroom design: using student feedback to identify the best components from online and face-to-face classes, Higher Education Studies 4(3) (2014), 38-47.
P. Dawson, M. Henderson, P. Mahoney, M. Phillips, T. Ryan, D. Boud and E. Molloy, What makes for effective feedback: staff and student perspectives, Assessment and Evaluation in Higher Education 44(1) (2019), 25-36.
A. De Mauro, M. Greco, M. Grimaldi and P. Ritala, Human resources for big data professions: a systematic classification of job roles and required skill sets, Information Processing and Management 54 (2018), 807-817.
N. Eugene, C. Lee and F. Famoye, Beta-normal distribution and its applications, Comm. Statist. Theory Methods 31(4) (2002), 497-512.
F. Famoye, C. Lee and N. Eugene, Beta-normal distribution: bimodality properties and application, Journal of Modern Applied Statistical Methods 3(1) (2004), 85-103.
J. B. Garfield, Beyond testing and grading: using assessment to improve student learning, Journal of Statistics Education 2 (1994), 1-11.
G. H. Givens and J. A. Hoeting, Computational Statistics, John Wiley & Sons, Vol. 703, 2012.
Y. M. Gomez, E. Go’mez-Dniz, O. Venegas, D. I. Gallardo and H. W. Gmez, An asymmetric bimodal distribution with application to quantile regression, Symmetry 11 (2019), 899.
M. Gupta and J. F. George, Toward the development of a big data analytics capability, Information and Management 53(8) (2016), 1049-1064.
P. Hall and M. York, On the calibration of Silverman’s test for multimodality, Statist. Sinica 11 (2001), 515-536.
J. A. Hartigan and P. M. Hartigan, The DIP test of unimodality, Ann. Statist. 13 (1985), 70-84.
M. Hassan and M. Y. El-Bassiouni, Bimodal skew-symmetric normal distribution, Comm. Statist. Theory Methods 45(5) (2016), 1527-1541.
M. Hassan and R. Hijazi, A bimodal exponential power distribution, Pakistan J. Statist. 26(2) (2010), 379-396.
N. J. Horton and J. S. Hardin, Integrating computing in the statistics and data science curriculum: creative structures, novel skills and habits, and ways to teach computational thinking, Journal of Statistics and Data Science Education 29(sup1) (2021), S1-S3. URL: https://doi.org/10.1080/10691898.2020.1870416.
Y. Kang and Y. Noh, Development of Hartigan’s dip statistic with bimodality coefficient to assess multimodality of distributions, Math. Probl. Eng. Vol. 2019, Article ID 4819475, p. 17.
H. J. Kim, On a class of two-piece skew-normal distributions, Statistics 39 (2005), 537-553.
T. I. Lin, J. C. Lee and S. Y. Yen, Finite mixture modeling using the skew-normal distribution, Statist. Sinica 17 (2007), 909-927.
Y. Ma and M. G. Genton, Flexible class of skew-symmetric distributions, Scand. J. Statist. 31 (2004), 459-468.
D. W. Muller and G. Sawitzki, Excess mass estimates and tests for multimodality, J. Amer. Statist. Assoc. 86(415) (1991), 738-746.
S. Salloum, R. Dautov, X. Chen, P. X. Peng and J. Z. Huang, Big data analytics on Apache Spark, Int. J. Data Sci. Anal. 1 (2016), 145-164.
B. W. Silverman, Using kernel density estimates to investigate multimodality, J. Roy. Statist. Soc. Ser. B 43 (1981), 97-99.
B. W. Silverman, Density Estimation for Statistics and Data Analysis, Chapman and Hall, London, 1986.
D. Singh and C. K. Reddy, A survey on platforms for big data analytics, Journal of Big Data 2(1) (2015), 1-20.
K. Struyven, F. Dochy and S. Janssens, Students’ perceptions about evaluation and assessment in higher education: a review, Assessment and Evaluation in Higher Education 30(4) (2005), 325-341.
M. Van Wart, A. Ni, L. Rose, T. McWeeney and R. A. Worrell, Literature review and model of online teaching effectiveness integrating concerns for learning achievement, student satisfaction, faculty satisfaction, and institutional results, Pan-Pacific Journal of Business Research 10(1) (2019), 1-22.
R. Vila, H. Saulo and J. Roldan, On some properties of the bimodal normal distribution and its bivariate version, Chil. J. Stat. 12(2) (2021), 125-144.
M. B. Wilk and R. Gnanadesikan, Probability plotting methods for the analysis of data, Biometrika 55 (1968), 1-17.
M. Zaharia, R. S. Xin, P. Wendell, T. Das, M. Armbrust, A. Dave, X. Meng, J. Rosen, S. Venkataraman, M. J. Franklin, A. Ghodsi, J. Gonzalez, S. Shenker and I. Stoica, Apache Spark: a unified engine for big data processing, Communications of the ACM 59(11) (2016), 56-65.
Downloads
Published
Issue
Section
License
Copyright (c) 2023 Pushpa Publishing House, Prayagraj, India

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License.
____________________________
Attribution: Credit Pushpa Publishing House as the original publisher, including title and author(s) if applicable.
No Derivatives: Modifying or creating derivative works not allowed without written permission.
Contact Pushpa Publishing House for more info or permissions.
Journal Impact Factor: 