The scale parameter of a distribution determines the scale of the distribution function. The scale is either estimated from the data or specified based on historical process knowledge.

Interpretation

The scale parameter can affect how spread out the data are. Generally, a larger scale value can cause the distribution to appear more horizontally stretched out. A smaller scale value can cause the distribution to appear more horizontally compressed.

Effect of the scale parameter for a logistic distribution

This graph shows the effect of the different values of the scale parameter on the logistic distribution.