CHAP.

11

PROBABILITY

Thus, combining with axiom 1, we obtain

0 < P(A) 5 1

Property 5 implies that

P(A u B) IP(A)

+ P(B)

since P(A n B) 2 0 by axiom 1.

1.5 EQUALLY LIKELY EVENTS

A. Finite Sample Space:

Consider a finite sample space S with n finite elements
where

ti's are elementary events. Let P(ci) = pi. Then

3. If A =

u &, where I is a collection of subscripts, then

if1

B. Equally Likely Events:

When all elementary events (5, ( i = 1,2, ...,n) are equally likely, that is,
p1 = p 2 = " * -

- Pn

then from Eq. (1.35), we have

and
where n(A) is the number of outcomes belonging to event A and n is the number of sample points
in S.

1.6 CONDITIONAL PROBABILITY

A. Definition :
The conditional probability of an event A given event B, denoted by P(A I B), is defined as

where P(A n B) is the joint probability of A and B. Similarly,