University of Munich
Department of Statistics
Professor Leo Knüsel

Using the program ELV

The program ELV (Elementary Distributions, in German: ELementare Verteilungen) computes probabilities and quantiles of some elementary statistical distributions. Upper and lower tail probabilities of all distributions are computed with six significant digits for probabilities as small as 10^(-100); probabilities smaller than 10^(-100) are rounded to zero. Upper and lower quantiles are computed for all distributions 1-9 (see below) for tail probabilies P with 10^(-12) <= P <= 0.5.

When starting the program ELV the following main menu appears:. 

   Main Menu


   1.	Standard normal distribution
   2.	Gamma distribution
   3.	Chisquare distribution
   4.	Beta distribution
   5.	F distribution 
   6.	t distribution (Student's distribution)
   7.	Poisson distribution
   8.	Binomial distribution
   9.	Hypergeometric distribution


   -1,...,-9:  Quantiles of the distributions 1,...,9
   12,...,16:  Noncentral version of the distributions 2,...,6


   Choose a distribution by entering the corresponding number:
If I want to compute e.g. quantiles of the standard normal distribuiton I enter -1 and press the ENTER key. The program answers: 

   Quantiles of the standard normal distribution
   Enter P:
I enter the value 0.05, and after pressing the ENTER key I obtain the anwer: 

   Input:  P = 0.05               Output:  zr = 1.64485

   Quantiles of the standard normal distribution
   Enter P:
Now I can compute some other quantiles of the standard normal distribution by entering the corresponding P-values, or I can switch to some other distribution by pressing the Esc key (Escape key) or the F6 key (F6 = CTRL+Z = EOF = end of file), which brings me back to the main menu. If I want to leave the program I press again the Esc key (or the F6-key).

The complete documentation of the program ELV with the definition of the distributions and their parameters, and with hints for reentering previously entered parameter values without retyping them is found by clicking on Documentation of the Program ELV (file ELV_DOCU.PDF of about 250K).