# Continue from my previous question - distribution for a set of data using R results

Follow the very useful answers from Peter Flom, Wayne and many others. I have now started using R and it gives me a feeling of python :)

The results are below but I am not sure how should I go from here ? The density certain looks much better after log transformation. Can you please shed some light on how to do further analysis ?

Thanks a lot.

R - Results below:

plot (density (messages$length)) plot (density (log (messages$length))) summary (messages)

> summary(message$mb) Min. 1st Qu. Median Mean 3rd Qu. Max. 0.00665 0.32610 0.88450 2.08500 2.35000 49.13000  qqnorm (messages$length)

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EDIT: Thanks all all the answering !

I have tried the qqnorm with log(x) and it looks like a straight line ! Does this mean my data is pretty much following a Log-normal distribution ?

qqnorm (log(messages$length)): Also I have tried to fit my data with a log-normal and below is the result. fitdistr(message$mb, densfun="log-normal") meanlog sdlog
-0.19019347 1.45795269 ( 0.02003787) ( 0.01416891)

Does this mean anything ?

• The log-transformed data look quite normal. You could try to use the fitdistr function from the MASS package. On your untransformed data, you could try to fit a log-normal distribution: fitdistr(messages$length, densfun="log-normal"). This post might provide some further imputs. – COOLSerdash May 23 '13 at 15:56 • You can push the logarithms through qqnorm() too. If there is systematic curvature, lognormal is not quite right, although that doesn't mean that there is a much better candidate. Gamma might be another one to try. My wild guess from the density plot is that lognormal will work better than the gamma. – Nick Cox May 23 '13 at 16:55 • Yes. I am only a very occasional R user, but you can exploit the definition of lognormal, that if x is lognormal then log x is normal, and qqnorm() applied to that should show a straight line. – Nick Cox May 23 '13 at 22:28 • @Gob00st Thanks for updating your question. I would suggest that you use the qqPlot function from the car package. Then you could either put qqPlot(messages$length, distribution="lnorm") or qqPlot(log(messages$length), distribution="norm") to fit QQ-plot on the original scale or on the log-scale. The output from fitdistr are the mean and sd of your distribution on the log scale. – COOLSerdash May 24 '13 at 11:19 • @Gob00st Have you tried to install the package (install.packages("car"))? That works for me. If you assume that your data follow a log-normal distribution with a mean of -0.19 and a sd of 1.458 on the log scale, you can use the CDF of the normal distribution to calculate the probability that a message exceeds 45M: 1-pnorm(log(45), mean=-0.19019347, sd=1.45795269) This gives a probability of 0.0031. – COOLSerdash May 24 '13 at 12:22 ## 1 Answer I want to quickly summarize my comments for your convenience. From what I've seen of your data, they seem compatible with a log-normal distribution with a mean and standard deviation on the log scale of$\mu=-0.19$and$\sigma=1.458$, respectively. The density plot of your log-transformed data is not perfectly symmetrical, it has a small negative skew. "On the log scale" means that the mean and standard deviation given are those corresponding to the log-transformed data - which should follow a normal distribution then. The mean on your original scale would be$\exp(\mu + \sigma^{2}/2)$and the standard deviation$\sqrt{\left[\exp(\sigma^{2})-1 \right]\cdot \exp(2\mu + \sigma^{2})}$, or numerically:$2.39$and$6.50$. The mode (the peak of your distribution) on the original scale would be$\exp(\mu - \sigma^{2})=0.099$. The probability that a message exceeds a size of$a\$ can be calculated as follows:

• On the log scale using the CDF of the normal distribution: pnorm(log(a), mean=-0.19019347, sd=1.45795269, lower.tail=FALSE)
• On the original scale using the CDF of the log-normal distribution: plnorm(a, meanlog=-0.19019347, sdlog=1.45795269, lower.tail=FALSE)
• Thanks a lot for your help, you have been more than helpful, I love this stats community ! – Gob00st May 24 '13 at 14:26
• @Gob00st You're welcome. Glad I could help. – COOLSerdash May 24 '13 at 14:27