5. Univariate Continuous Distributions

Attribution

This chapter was written by Patricia Mares Nasarre and Robert Lanzafame. Find out more here.

Civil engineering and Geosciences involve working with nature and that comes with associated uncertainties. Natural phenomena have an intrinsic aleatoric uncertainty that we need to model. Moreover, we don’t always have the resources to neglect the epistemic uncertainty; we typically need to make decisions in scenarios of data scarcity.

This is where probability in general and continuous distributions in particular come in indispensable as they model the uncertainty and allow to assess the risk in our decisions and incorporate it in the decision-making process.