**What Is a Statistical Distribution?** The probability distribution derives from variance. If both you and I flipped 10 coins, it’s pretty likely that we would get different results (you might get 5 heads and I get 7). This variance, a.k.a. uncertainty around the outcome, produces a probability distribution, which basically tells us what outcomes are relatively more likely (such as 5 heads) and which outcomes are relatively less likely (such as 10 heads). So each set of 10 coin flips is like a random variable. We don’t know beforehand exactly how many heads we will get. But if we know its distribution, then we know which outcomes are probable and which are not. And that’s basically what any statistical distribution tells us — it’s a graph that tells us how likely it is to get each of the possible results. Or another way to think about it, it is what the distribution of outcomes would converge to if we ran an experiment with an uncertain outcome over and over again (collecting the...
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