Marginal distribution
![](/Images/godic/202501/26/Nuvola_apps_atlantik1128.png")
![Many samples from a bivariate normal distribution. The marginal distributions are shown in red and blue. The marginal distribution of X is also approximated by creating a histogram of the X coordinates without consideration of the Y coordinates.](/Images/godic/202501/26/MultivariateNormal1128.png")
In probability theory and statistics, the marginal distribution of a subset of a collection of random variables is the probability distribution of the variables contained in the subset. It gives the probabilities of various values of the variables in the subset without reference to the values of the other variables. This contrasts with a conditional distribution, which gives the probabilities contingent upon the values of the other variables.