How to find probabilities
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!
- How to find probabilities
Concept of probability:
Probability deals with the likelihood of occurrence of a given event. The probability value lies between 0 and 1. An event with probability 1 is considered as certain event and an event with probability 0 is considered as an impossible event. The probability of 0.5 infers of having equal odds of occurring and not occurring of an event.
The general formula to obtain probability of an event A is,
P(A) = (number of favorable elements for event A)/(Total number of elements in the sample space).
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