Chi distribution


In probability theory and statistics, the chi distribution is a continuous probability distribution. It is the distribution of the square root of the sum of squares of independent random variables having a standard normal distribution, or equivalently, the distribution of the Euclidean distance of the random variables from the origin. The most familiar examples are the Rayleigh distribution with chi distribution with 2 degrees of freedom, and the Maxwell distribution of (normalized) molecular speeds which is a chi distribution with 3 degrees of freedom (one for each spatial coordinate). If are k independent, normally distributed random variables with means
and standard deviations
, then the statistic