ELI5: Explain Like I'm 5

Categorical distribution

Hello! Do you know what a category is? It's like putting things in different groups. For example, if we have different fruits like apples, bananas, and oranges, we can put each fruit in its own category. Apples go in the apple category, bananas go in the banana category, and oranges go in the orange category.

Now, let's talk about the categorical distribution. This is like a way of measuring or describing how often things fall into different categories. Let's say we have a bag of Skittles and we want to know how many of each color there are. We could count all the red ones, all the orange ones, all the yellow ones, and so on, and then we would have how many Skittles fall into each category.

The categorical distribution gives us a way to describe this information. It tells us how likely it is for a Skittle to be in each category. For example, maybe we find that there are 10 red Skittles, 8 orange Skittles, 6 yellow Skittles, and so on. We could use the categorical distribution to say that there is a 25% chance of picking a red Skittle, a 20% chance of picking an orange Skittle, a 15% chance of picking a yellow Skittle, and so on.

So, the categorical distribution is basically a way of measuring how often things fall into different categories. It can be useful for lots of things, like predicting the outcomes of different events, or analyzing data in science or economics.