A coin is weighted such that a tail is 10 times as likely as a head. This coin is tossed repeatedly until a head appears, up to a maximum of ten times. If there are no heads even after the tenth toss, the procedure ends. Calculate the expected number of heads, and its variance and standard deviation.
Continuous Probability Distributions
Probability distributions are of two types, which are continuous probability distributions and discrete probability distributions. A continuous probability distribution contains an infinite number of values. For example, if time is infinite: you could count from 0 to a trillion seconds, billion seconds, so on indefinitely. A discrete probability distribution consists of only a countable set of possible values.
Normal Distribution
Suppose we had to design a bathroom weighing scale, how would we decide what should be the range of the weighing machine? Would we take the highest recorded human weight in history and use that as the upper limit for our weighing scale? This may not be a great idea as the sensitivity of the scale would get reduced if the range is too large. At the same time, if we keep the upper limit too low, it may not be usable for a large percentage of the population!
A coin is weighted such that a tail is 10 times as likely as a head. This
coin is tossed repeatedly until a head appears, up to a maximum of ten
times. If there are no heads even after the tenth toss, the procedure ends.
Calculate the expected number of heads, and its variance and standard
deviation.
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