Is this Uniform? Geometric? binomial? or normal?

Question

I was gonna say this is Uniform but wasn't sure

The time of day when an earthquake occurs.

Is this Uniform? Geometric? binomial? or normal?

Answer 1

Your instincts are leading you right. Of course, one has to make some assumptions. From your statement it appears that you are assuming that an earthquake will happen, only time time is unknown. While recurring events that happen with a known rate but are random can be modeled by a poisson distribution we have here just a time of event, given that an event will happen.

So: If the event will happen between midnight and midnight (bounded) and the chances of it happening at any one time are the same (random) then the distribution will be uniform.