Note that the empirical distribution is a special type of kernel smoothed distribution in
which the random variable assigns probability 1 to the data point. An alternative to the
empirical distribution that is similar in spirit but produces different numbers is presented
later. Chapter 12 shows how the definition can be modified to account for data that have
been altered through censoring and truncation. With regard to kernel smoothing, there are
several distributions that could be used, a few of which are introduced in Section 12.3.
Throughout Chapters 11 and 12, five examples are used repeatedly. Because they are
simply data sets, they are referred to as Data Sets A, B, C, and D.