Introduction to Statistics and Data Analysis - Method of Moments to Fit Distributions from Data

The method of moments is one of the simplest and most intuitive methods to fit the parameters of a probability distribution from data. In the method of moments, we approximate the moments of the distribution in terms of sample data (e.g., sample mean, sample variance, etc.), and then use these moments to solve for the unknown parameters (e.g., the decay rate lambda in a Poisson model, etc.) This video was produced at the University of Washington, and we acknowledge funding support from the Boeing Company %%% CHAPTERS %%% 00:00 Intro 03:32 Example: Poisson Distribution 06:35 Example: Normal Distribution 09:51 Summary