In probability theory and statistics, the Gumbel distribution is used to model the distribution of the maximum of a number of samples of various distributions. This distribution might be used to represent the distribution of the maximum level of a river in a particular year if there was a list of maximum values for the past ten years. It is useful in predicting the chance that an extreme earthquake, flood or other natural disaster will occur. The potential applicability of the Gumbel distribution to represent the distribution of maxima relates to extreme value theory, which indicates that it is likely to be useful if the distribution of the underlying sample data is of the normal or exponential type. This article uses the Gumbel distribution to model the distribution of the maximum value. To model the minimum value, use the negative of the original values. The Gumbel distribution is a particular case of the generalized extreme value distribution. It is also known as the log-Weibull distribution and the double exponential distribution. It is related to the Gompertz distribution: when its density is first reflected about the origin and then restricted to the positive half line, a Gompertz function is obtained. In the latent variable formulation of the multinomial logit model — common in discrete choice theory — the errors of the latent variables follow a Gumbel distribution. This is useful because the difference of two Gumbel-distributed random variables has a logistic distribution. The Gumbel distribution is named after Emil Julius Gumbel, based on his original papers describing the distribution.
The mode is μ, while the median is and the mean is given by The standard deviation is hence At the mode, where, the value of becomes, irrespective of the value of
Related distributions
If has a Gumbel distribution, then the conditional distribution of Y=−X given that Y is positive, or equivalently given that X is negative, has a Gompertz distribution. The cdf G of Y is related to F, the cdf of X, by the formula for y>0. Consequently, the densities are related by : the Gompertz density is proportional to a reflected Gumbel density, restricted to the positive half-line.
If X is an exponentially distributed variable with mean 1, then −log has a standard Gumbel distribution.
Gumbel has shown that the maximum value in a sample of a random variable following an exponential distribution approaches the Gumbel distribution closer with increasing sample size. In hydrology, therefore, the Gumbel distribution is used to analyze such variables as monthly and annual maximum values of daily rainfall and river discharge volumes, and also to describe droughts. Gumbel has also shown that the estimator for the probability of an event — where r is the rank number of the observed value in the data series and n is the total number of observations — is an unbiased estimator of the cumulative probability around the mode of the distribution. Therefore, this estimator is often used as a plotting position. In number theory, the Gumbel distribution approximates the number of terms in a random partition of an integer as well as the trend-adjusted sizes of maximal prime gaps and maximal gaps between prime constellations. In machine learning, the Gumbel distribution is sometimes employed to generate samples from the categorical distribution.
Computational methods
Probability paper
In pre-software times probability paper was used to picture the Gumbel distribution. The paper is based on linearization of the cumulative distribution function : In the paper the horizontal axis is constructed at a double log scale. The vertical axis is linear. By plotting on the horizontal axis of the paper and the -variable on the vertical axis, the distribution is represented by a straight line with a slope 1. When distribution fitting software like CumFreq became available, the task of plotting the distribution was made easier, as is demonstrated in the section below.
Generating Gumbel variates
Since the quantile function,, of a Gumbel distribution is given by the variate has a Gumbel distribution with parameters and when the random variate is drawn from the uniform distribution on the interval.
