How can I find out which distributions I can use in fitdistrplus in R

I have some data (x) and want to determine which distribution fits them best. I used:

descdist(x, discrete = FALSE, boot = 1000) fit.norm<- fitdist(x, "norm") plot(fit.norm) fit.norm$aic 

and did the same for weibull, gamma and lnorm. In the documentation I could not find a list of which other distributions (and the corresponding syntax) are possible. Does anyone know where I can find this information?

2 Answers

From the FAQ you get if you type ??fitdistplus

As documented, we provide initial values for the following distributions: norm, lnorm, exp, pois, cauchy, gamma, logis, nbinom, geom, beta, weibull from the stats package; invgamma, llogis, invweibull, pareto1, pareto from the actuar package.

Documentation also suggests you can use any distribution if you can specify it or find it in a pre-existing package.

Add on to @Jacob's answer, here are two documentation pages I found really helpful where both the distribution names and the R syntax can be seen.

  • Distributions in the stats package
  • CRAN Task View: Probability Distributions
  • ncG1vNJzZmirpJawrLvVnqmfpJ%2Bse6S7zGiorp2jqbawutJoa2lwZmaDc36OoaawZZOWu261jJ%2Bgp5xdpMK1edahoJygXZm2tMDRopmurJmku7R5yGaamqZdqsCmecinZJ%2BhpJm2tMDRqaOuq12eu26%2B