Bernoulli and Binomial Distributions

A Bernoulli Distribution is the probability distribution of a random variable which takes the value 1 with probability p and value 0 with probability 1 – p, i.e.

$$
\begin{cases}
1-p & \text{for}\ k=0 \\
p & \text{for}\ k=1 \\
\end{cases}$$

We will use the example of left-handedness. Approximately 10% of the population are left-handed (p=0.1).

We want to know, out of a random sample of 10 people, what is the probability of 3 of these 10 people being left handed?

We assign a 1 to each person if they are left handed and 0 otherwise:

• $P(X=1) = 0.1$
• $P(X=0) = 0.9$

A Binomial distribution is derived from the Bernoulli distribution.

We’ll start with the simpler problem:

What is the probability of the first 3 people we pick being left-handed, followed by 7 people being right-handed?

This is just $ 0.1 ^3 \times 0.9 ^7$

What if we wanted the last 3 people to be left-handed?

This is just $0.9^7 \times 0.1^3$, the same answer.

In fact, no matter how we arrange the 3 people, we will always end up with the same probability ($ 4.7 \times 10^{-4} $).

So we have to add up all the ways we can arrange the 3 people being picked.

There are $10!$ ways to arrange 10 people and there are $3!$ ways to arrange the 3 people that are picked and $7!$ ways to arrange the 7 people that aren’t picked.

This is given as:
$$\dfrac{10!}{3!\ 7!}$$

Or more commonly, “10 choose 3”. The “n choose k” notation is written as:
$$
\begin{equation*}
\binom{n}{k}
\end{equation*} = \dfrac{n!}{k!\ (n-k)!}
$$

We can now caclulate the probability that there are 3 left-handed people in a random selection of 10 people as:

$$
P(X=3) = \begin{equation*}
\binom{10}{3}
\end{equation*} (0.1)^3 (0.9)^7
$$

$ P(X=3) = 0.057 $

This will generalise such that:

$$
P(X=k) = \begin{equation*}
\binom{n}{k}
\end{equation*} (p)^k (1-p)^{n-k}
$$

Scipy’s stats package has a binomial package that can be used to calculate these probabilities:

We can use this function to calculate what the probability of 3 or fewer people being left-handed from a selection of 10 people.

$$
P(X \leq 3) = \sum_{i=0}^{3} \begin{equation*}
\binom{10}{i}
\end{equation*} (0.1)^i (0.9)^{n-i}
$$

$ P(X \leq 3) = 0.987 $

Or we could plot our probability results for each value up to all 10 people being left-handed:

We can see there is almost negligible chance of getting more than 6 left-handed people in a random group of 10 people.

Roulette

On an American roulette wheel there are 38 squares:

• 18 black
• 18 red
• 2 green

We bet on black 10 times in a row, what are the chances of winning more than half of these?

$$
P(X \gt 5) = \sum_{i=6}^{10} \begin{equation*}
\binom{10}{i}
\end{equation*} \bigg(\dfrac{18}{38}\bigg)^i \bigg(1-\dfrac{18}{38}\bigg)^{n-i}
$$

$ P(X \gt 5) = 0.314 $

Poisson Distribution

A Poisson distribution is a limiting version of the binomial distribution, where $n$ becomes large and $np$ approaches some value $\lambda$, which is the mean value.

The Poisson distribution can be used for the number of events in other specified intervals such as distance, area or volume. Examples that may follow a Poisson include the number of phone calls received by a call center per hour and the number of decay events per second from a radioactive source.

It is calculated as:

$ P(k) = e^{-\lambda} \dfrac{\lambda^k}{k!} $

The average number of goals in a World Cup football match is 2.5.

We would like to know the probability of 4 goals in a match.

Again, scipy has in-built functions for calculating this and we can use this to calculate the probability of any number of goals in a World Cup match.