I first read about the Cauchy distribution in a book titled The Physics of Wall Street by James Owen Weatherall. Before then, I was mostly familiar with the normal distribution. The normal distribution shows variance as contained around mean, median, and mode. The Cauchy distribution can look like a normal distribution but it actually has no mean. What is unsettling is how real world processes or events might seem like a normal distribution, but actually be a Cauchy distribution. Which means a variance you believed to have reasonable bounds would suddenly go haywire.
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I first read about the Cauchy distribution in a book titled The Physics of Wall Street by James Owen Weatherall. Before then, I was mostly familiar with the normal distribution. The normal distribution shows variance as contained around mean, median, and mode. The Cauchy distribution can look like a normal distribution but it actually has no mean. What is unsettling is how real world processes or events might seem like a normal distribution, but actually be a Cauchy distribution. Which means a variance you believed to have reasonable bounds would suddenly go haywire.
https://www.itl.nist.gov/div898/handbook/eda/section3/eda366...