Section: 29.5.9.3.2 [rand.dist.bern.bin], 29.5.9.3.4 [rand.dist.bern.negbin] Status: NAD Submitter: Stephan Tolksdorf Opened: 2007-09-21 Last modified: 2016-01-28
Priority: Not Prioritized
View all issues with NAD status.
Discussion:
In my opinion the choice of name for the t parameter of the binomial_distribution
is very unfortunate. In virtually every internet reference, book and software implementation
this parameter is called n instead, see for example Wikipedia, Mathworld, Evans et al. (1993)
Statistical Distributions, 2nd E., Wiley, p. 38, the R statistical computing language, p. 926,
Mathematica and Matlab.
Similarly, the choice of k for the parameter of the negative binomial distributions is rather unusual.
The most common choice for the negative binomial distribution seems to be r instead.
Choosing unusual names for the parameters causes confusion among users and makes the interface unnecessarily inconvenient to use.
Possible resolution: For these reasons, I propose to change the name of the respective parameters
to n and r.
[ Bellevue: ]
In N2424. NAD It has been around for a while. It is hardly universal, there is prior art, and this would confuse people.
Proposed resolution:
See N2424 for the proposed resolution.