Data often exhibit a heaped distribution in situations when there are either rounding or recall issues. Then, heaping is observed in the distribution when there are unusual spikes at certain values. In this app, the focus is heaping present at multiples of 5. Two rounding behaviors are assumed and they are accounted for in the form of two rounding probabilities. The first rounding probability describes the tendency to round with smaller values, while the second rounding probability describes the tendency to round with larger values. Therefore, a mixture model is constructed with a specified distribution and the two rounding probabilities. Throughout the app, interpretations in popovers are provided for users to understand the different stages of the demonstration.
Users have the option to either simulate data or upload data to begin the app. There are five distributions for users to choose and the parameters can be adjusted. The proceeding tab describes the rounding process to users; the actual and rounded/heaped distributions are visually displayed for users to compare. With the heaped distribution, the goal for users is to estimate the actual distribution with maximum likelihood. After obtaining the estimates, confidence intervals can be produced either based on the inverse Fisher information matrix or bootstrapping. For users to validate the method, a simulation study can be performed in the last tab of the app. They can compare the means of the MLE distributions to the specified underlying parameters.