Lecture Probability Theory - Lecture 6: Mean, Variance, Moments and Characteristic Functions. Mean, Variance and Characteristic Functions of various random variables are derived here. Chen's theorem to compute the Poisson moments, and an iterative formula to compute Gaussian moments are also derived here. As an application, the characteristic function is used to show that a Binomial random variable tends to behave like a Gaussian random variable as the number of trials becomes large. |