From the course: Learning Excel: Data Analysis

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Use the Poisson distribution

Use the Poisson distribution - Microsoft Excel Tutorial

From the course: Learning Excel: Data Analysis

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Use the Poisson distribution

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- [Instructor] If you analyze business data, and especially if you perform any kind of simulation, it's useful to know about the Poisson distribution. In this movie, I will describe the characteristics of that distribution and also show you how to use it in Excel. The Poisson distribution uses an average, called Lambda, and it determines the amount of time between events occurring. So for example, if you have customers that arrive on average every seven minutes, then this is what the curve would look like given that your data is distributed according to the Poisson distribution. To show what that looks like in Excel, I will switch over to our workbook. I've switched over to Excel, and my sample file is 04_ 04_Poisson, and you can find that in the chapter four folder of the exercise files collection. And this distribution is called the Poisson distribution because it was created, or at least discovered, by a French mathematician by the name of Poisson. The idea is that you want to…

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