The Cauchy distribution is the student's t distribution with one degree of freedom. The Cauchy distribution does not have a well defined mean or variance. Cauchy distributions often appear as priors in Bayesian contexts due to their heavy tails.
Details
We recommend reading this documentation on pkgdown which renders math nicely. https://pkg.mitchelloharawild.com/distributional/reference/dist_cauchy.html
In the following, let \(X\) be a Cauchy variable with mean
location = \(x_0\) and scale = \(\gamma\).
Support: \(R\), the set of all real numbers
Mean: Undefined.
Variance: Undefined.
Probability density function (p.d.f):
$$ f(x) = \frac{1}{\pi \gamma \left[1 + \left(\frac{x - x_0}{\gamma} \right)^2 \right]} $$
Cumulative distribution function (c.d.f):
$$ F(t) = \frac{1}{\pi} \arctan \left( \frac{t - x_0}{\gamma} \right) + \frac{1}{2} $$
Moment generating function (m.g.f):
Does not exist.
Examples
dist <- dist_cauchy(location = c(0, 0, 0, -2), scale = c(0.5, 1, 2, 1))
dist
#> <distribution[4]>
#> [1] Cauchy(0, 0.5) Cauchy(0, 1) Cauchy(0, 2) Cauchy(-2, 1)
mean(dist)
#> [1] NA NA NA NA
variance(dist)
#> [1] NA NA NA NA
skewness(dist)
#> [1] NA NA NA NA
kurtosis(dist)
#> [1] NA NA NA NA
generate(dist, 10)
#> [[1]]
#> [1] 0.16436423 -0.36303672 1.26223878 0.08354728 -0.02120479 -1.47284153
#> [7] 0.25235889 -4.08583157 0.20856069 -0.05809328
#>
#> [[2]]
#> [1] 0.14852868 0.55553383 -0.20222143 -0.09236857 -1.28690288 -0.37754209
#> [7] -0.07277641 0.11008192 5.13322088 -2.04989004
#>
#> [[3]]
#> [1] -3.247181e-02 3.037688e+00 -9.729277e-01 -1.569769e+01 -8.401015e-01
#> [6] -4.081397e+01 -8.695138e-01 -9.679548e-01 3.797027e+00 6.515121e-04
#>
#> [[4]]
#> [1] -1.2482954 -2.1738142 -0.7808444 -2.3925369 -2.1227681 -1.9873750
#> [7] -7.9616775 -1.1767630 -4.0135263 -3.1509213
#>
density(dist, 2)
#> [1] 0.03744822 0.06366198 0.07957747 0.01872411
density(dist, 2, log = TRUE)
#> [1] -3.284796 -2.754168 -2.531024 -3.977943
cdf(dist, 4)
#> [1] 0.9604166 0.9220209 0.8524164 0.9474315
quantile(dist, 0.7)
#> [1] 0.3632713 0.7265425 1.4530851 -1.2734575