Stack Exchange network consists of 183 Q&A communities including Stack Overflow, the largest, most trusted online community for developers to learn, share their knowledge, and build their careers.
The zeroes are relevant, it's just that I didn't specify the problem properly (I edited the question). Thanks for the terminology "probability distribution with discrete spikes", that's a good way of describing the problem. The problem I described is a special case of that, in that I know my discrete spike is at 0, and its probability is the cumulative probability of the normal distribution up to -m and the remaining continuous distribution is a Truncated normal distribution.
Oops, damn, I realized I forgot to add that I generate the data (before truncation) using a distribution with mean m and variance 1. So it's not the variance of the distribution I'm trying to estimate, but the mean. Sorry for the missing information :P
