Polynomial Families of Distributions
Published Date: March 1, 1992
It is often necessary to estimate the population distribution of a random variate from a sample of observed values. Standard parametric families may not provide satisfactory fit to the data. A polynomial family is constructed by assuming that the distribution function G is a constrained polynomial of the cumulative distribution F of a convenient parametric family. Polynomial families offer great flexibility in data fitting, while retaining the important feature of parametric families that information in the data is condensed into a moderate number of values. This research contribution presents some theory of polynomial families.
