Chapter_5_Probability.pdf

1 CHAPTER 5: PROBABILITY 1. DEFINITIONS Experiment : a process that produces outcomes. –More than one possible outcome –Only one outcome per trial Trial : one repetition of the process Example 1a. Interviewing 20 randomly selected consumers and asking them which brand of appliance they prefer. Example 2a. Randomly select, without replacement, two families from the residents of Tiny Town. Tiny town population Family Children in household Number of automobiles A Yes 3 B Yes 2 C No 1 D Yes 2 Example 3a. Sample five bottles coming off a production line. Elementary Event : cannot be decomposed or broken down into other events Event : an outcome of an experiment –may be an elementary event, or –may be an aggregate of elementary events –usually represented by an uppercase letter, i.e. A, E1 Example 1b. Elementary event : people who prefer Sony. Joint event : people who prefer Sony and Toshiba. Example 2b. -Elementary event : the sample includes families A and C -Joint event : each family in the sample has children in the household Example 3b. Event : get one defective and four good bottles Sample space : a complete roster or listing of all elementary events for an experiment. Examples. - All six faces of a die. - All 52 card of a deck. 2 Probability : it’s the numerical measure of the likelihood that an event will occur. Example 4 : Event A : get four good bottles in a production line The probability of that event will occur is denoted P(A). Probability of the complement : P( A ) = 1 - P(A) 2. ASSIGNING PROBABILITY TO EVENTS We are going to introduce the notion of a random experiment and describe the outcomes or events that may result from such an experiment. When attempting to solve any problem involving probabilities, you should begin by defining the random experiment and the sample space. Probabilities can be assigned to the simple events using : - the classical approac