Jamie C

Hi, Thanks for your reply. To give you the context the numbers are actually costs. I know that there were approximately 2000 costs incurred. I don't know the exact total spent but believe it was approximately $12,000 ...most of the costs were just small amounts. Lots of people are estimating the total cost at $12,000 (we will never know for sure the total cost as we can't find out what every single one of the 2000 costs incurred actually were). I want to see if I can add a mathematical dimension to all the people just sticking their finger in the air and guessing what the total is. What I'm trying to get to is a statement that says something like "If the 10 known costs know follow an XYZ distribution then the total costs incurred would be XXXXXX" where XXXXX is a total cost of around $11,000 to $13,000. I don't know if this is even possible but hopefully someone can pin this to a recognized distribution/rule/law/model/curve. Hope this explains! And thanks again for your reply. Apologies I am not in any way an expert in maths so really appreciate any help I can get ! Jamie.

Hi, I hope someone can help me with this problem! I have a distribution of 2000 numbers but I only know the first 10. The first 10 numbers are: 2025, 1000, 335, 300, 187.5, 135, 99.5, 20, 17.5, and 13.5. I know that the total of all 2000 numbers is about 12,000. What I am looking for is a recognised long tail curve model which using the first 10 numbers only predicts a total for all 2000 numbers in the sequence. I need the total to ideally be between 11,000 and 13,000. I did look at Zipfs law but I'm not sure this works. I am not a mathematician but would appreciate any recognised models/distribution curves/laws you could suggest and what the model you suggest would give as a total for all 2000 numbers in the sequence knowing only the first 10 numbers. The key thing that I am trying to do is fit these numbers to a recognised curve / long tail model. I am less bothered about the total (although ideally in the range 11000-13000) and more bothered about the model being something that would be recognised by mathematicians globally. I hope this is clear. Thank you so much in advance to anyone who tries to solve this for me!