Given a sample of points how could I determine what distribution does

[porums]

Given a sample of points how could I determine what distribution does it belong to ?

Any help please for newbie?

 

[NoMoreExams]

First step is for you to decide if it's a discrete or cont. ones. Then you want to look into "fitting a probability distribution". There's various ways to do that, one of them is to compute few statistics and see if you notice anything i.e. Mean = Variance, etc.

 

[statdad]

It is more a process of ruling out the distributions your sample is not from. Start by graphing the data - boxplot, as a guide for outliers, skewness or symmetry, histogram (for a large enough sample), probability plots, etc.
Be aware that it can take very large sample sizes to determine whether (as an example) your data is better described by a normal distribution, a t-distribution, or some other symmetric distribution.
with what source of data are you working?