Home MATH 340 Tuesday, February 11, 2014

Tuesday, February 11, 2014 CC-BY-NC
Discrete probability

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Introduction to discrete probability. The first part of the class was a quiz on discrete probability.

Notes originally by @xiamx, with some formatting/language changes by @dellsystem.

1Probability

The study of probability was initially motivated by gambling. We will consider probability w.r.t. finite probability spaces (or finitely countable spaces). A sample space $S$ is the set of all possible outcomes of an experiment. For example, for a die, the sample space is $S = \{1,2,3,4,5,6\}$.

An event $A$ is a subset of the sample space $S$.

We associate with each outcome $x \in S$ the probability $p(x)$ that $x$ is the outcome of the experiment. We say that $p : 2^S \mapsto \mathbb{R}$ is a valid probability distribution on $S$ if:

  1. $p(x) \geq 0$ $\forall x \in S$
  2. $\displaystyle \sum_{x\in S} p(x) = 1$
  3. $\displaystyle p(A) = \sum_{x\in A} p(x)$

Sometimes, the outcomes are all equally likely, with $\displaystyle p(x) = \frac {1}{|S|} \forall x\in S$ (for example, $p(x) = \frac{1}{6}$ for any number $x$ on a die). Usually, though, this is not the case.

1.1Examples

What is the probability of winning Lotto 6/49, in which the goal is to correctly pick 6 numbers, all in $\{1, \ldots, 49\}$?
Well, the size of the sample space is $\binom{49}{6} = 13983816$. So the probability is $\frac{1}{13983816}$.
What is the probability of a full house in a game of poker?
The sample space is $\binom{52}{5} = 2598960$. The number of ways to get a full house is $13 \cdot \binom{4}{3} \cdot 12 \cdot \binom{4}{2} = 3744$, so the probability is $\frac{3744}{2598960}$.

1.2Union and intersection

Lemma: For any probability distribution $P:S \to \mathbb{R}$ and any 2 events $A$ and $B$, we have:

$$p(A\cup B) = p(A) +p(B) - p(A \cap B)$$

The proof is trivial using set algebra.

Furthermore:

$$P(A \cup B) = P(A-B) + P(B-A) + P(A\cup B)$$