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The Gamma Distribution 7 Formulas
The Gamma Distribution 7 Formulas
This is part of a short series on the common life data distributions.
The Gamma distribution is routinely used to describe systems undergoing sequences of events or shocks which lead to eventual failure. Also used to describe renewal processes. This short article focuses on 7 formulas of the Gamma Distribution.
If you want to know more about fitting a set of data to a distribution, well that is in another article.
It has the essential formulas that you may find useful when answering specific questions. Knowing a distribution’s set of parameters does provide, along with the right formulas, a quick means to answer a wide range of reliability related questions.
Parameters
The scale parameter, λ which is greater than zero represents the rate or frequency of events or shocks.
The shape parameter, k may be interpreted as the number of shocks till failure (k as an integer only — and the distribution then is also called an Erlang distribution) or as a measure of the ability to resist shocks when not limited to being an integer.
The shape parameter, k, has the following characteristics:
