Distributionele

Distributionele is the Dutch adjective corresponding to the English term “distributional,” and it is used in several scientific fields to denote properties, methods, or analyses that relate to the way values or elements are distributed within a set, a function, or a language.

In probability theory and statistics, a distributionele description characterises a random variable by specifying its probability distribution, which may be given in terms of a probability mass function, a density function, or a cumulative distribution function. Concepts such as the distributionele law of large numbers, distributionele convergence, and distributionele moments (e.g., mean, variance) are central to the study of stochastic processes and inferential statistics. Tests and estimators are often evaluated on their distributionele properties, meaning how they behave under repeated sampling from a given population.

In linguistics, distributionele semantics refers to approaches that infer word meaning from patterns of co‑occurrence in large corpora. Distributionele analysis examines how linguistic items are distributed across contexts, enabling the construction of vector space models and word embeddings that capture semantic similarity without relying on explicit ontologies.

In mathematics, distributionele calculus, also known as the theory of distributions or generalized functions, extends the notion of derivatives to functions that are not classically differentiable. This framework is essential in solving differential equations with singularities and in the formal treatment of Dirac’s delta “function”.

Overall, the term distributionele signifies an emphasis on the quantitative or structural pattern of occurrence, whether in data, language, or mathematical objects.