Essentials of Pattern Recognition An Accessible Approach

The normal distribution is the most widely used continuous distribution, but many of its relevant properties are a little bit advanced for an undergraduate course. Hence, Part IV introduces some of these advanced topics. This chapter devotes itself to properties of normal distributions: single- and multivariate normal distributions, moment and canonical parameterizations, sum and product, geometry and the Mahalanobis distance, and conditional distributions. We also show that with these properties, some algorithms will become much easier to understand. We use parameter estimation and the Kalman filter as two such examples.