Statistical Inference

Assignment # 1

Muhammad Ibrahim Shamsi

(Discrete Probability Distributions)

Binomial Distribution
1. In a family of five children, what is the probability that exactly two children are male?
2. In basketball, Hamdan makes 3 baskets for every 10 shots. If he takes 4 shots, what is the
probability that at least 2 of them will be baskets?
3. A spinner is divided into six equal sectors labeled 1 through 6. What is the probability of
getting at most two prime numbers in three spins?
4. In a manufacturing process, the probability of a unit being defective is 0.08. Suppose we
sample 10 of these units. Find the probability that fewer than 2 units are defective. 5. If 40% of
all automobiles in Karachi are foreign-made, find the probability that if there are eight
automobiles in a MAJU parking lot, more than five are local-made.
Negative Binomial Distribution
6. The drilling records for an oil company suggest that the probability the company will hit oil in
productive quantities at a certain offshore location is 0.3. Suppose the company plans to drill
a series of wells looking for three successful wells. What is the probability that the third
success will be achieved with the 8th well drilled?
7. If the probability is 0.40 that a child exposed to a certain disease will catch it, what is the
probability that the sixth child exposed to the disease will be the third to catch it? 8. A large lot
containing 8% defective items. If items are drawn sequentially (item-by-item), what is the
probability that the second defective is observed on the 5th item?
9. In a Project championship series, the team that wins four projects out of seven is the winner.
Suppose that teams A and B face each other in the project championship and that team A has
probability 0.55 of winning a project over team B. What is the probability that team A will
win the championship series?
10. For a certain manufacturing process, it is known that, on the average, 1 in every 100 items is
defective. What is the probability that the fifth item inspected is the second defective item
found?
Hypergeometric Distribution
11. A shelf in MAJU Library contains 5 research journals on supply chain management and 4 on
entrepreneurship. 3 journals are picked at random. What is the probability that 2 supply chain
journals are selected?
12. An automotive company deals with RCD fuse box. Suppose that the company procure a fuse
box containing 20 fuses of which 6 are defective. If 2 fuses are selected at random without
replacement, what is the probability that both fuses are defective?
13. Of the 12 managers, seven are female. If the company needs to send four managers to a
 conference, find the probability that at most one is female.
14. Hayyan is curious of handling with portable hand-held electric flashlight. He removed two
dead batteries from a flashlight and inadvertently mingled them with the three good batteries
he intended as replacements. All the batteries look identical. Hayyan now randomly selects
two batteries. What is the probability he selects the two dead batteries?
15. A company is interested in evaluating its current inspection procedure for shipments of 50
identical items. The procedure is to take a sample of 5 and pass the shipment if no more than
2 are found to be defective. What proportion of shipments with 20% defectives will be
accepted?
Multivariate Hypergeometric Distribution
16. An unethical vendor has some defective computer merchandise that he is trying to unload. He
has 26 computers. Of these, 12 are ok, 4 have bad motherboards, 2 have bad video cards, and
8 have bad sound cards. If we go into buy 5 computers from this vendor, what is the
probability we get 3 good computers, 1 with a bad sound card and 1 with a bad video card?
17. A car rental agency at a local airport has available 5 Fords, 7 Chevrolets, 4 Dodges, 3
Hondas, and 4 Toyotas. If the agency randomly selects 9 of these cars to chauffeur delegates
from the airport to the downtown convention center, find the probability that 2 Fords, 3
Chevrolets, 1 Dodge, 1 Honda and 2 Toyotas are used.
18. A tenant plants 6 bulbs selected at random from a box containing 5 tulip bulbs, 4 daffodil
bulbs and 3 crocus bulbs. What is the probability that he planted 1 crocus bulb, 2 daffodil
bulbs and 3 tulip bulbs?
19. If 7 cards are dealt from an ordinary deck of 52 playing cards, what is the probability that
exactly 2 of them will be face cards and one of them will be an Ace?
20. Suppose there are 5 black, 10 white, and 15 red marbles in an urn. You reach in and randomly
select six marbles without replacement. What is the probability that you pick exactly two of
each color?
Poisson Distribution
21. If an average number of 120 cars pass through a particular village per hour, then what is the
probability that in any period of 5 minute exactly 8 cars pass through this village?
22. If electricity power failures occur according to a Poisson distribution with an average of 3
failures every twenty weeks, calculate the probability that there will not be more than one failure
during a particular week.
23. Assume that the number of un-inspected cars caught at a state police checkpoint is Poisson
distributed with average 3 per hour. What is the probability that at least 1 car caught within 10
minutes of setting up the checkpoint?
Poisson Approximation for Binomial
24. The expectation is that letters posted with TCS will be delivered the next day. Records show
that on average 4.8% of letters are delivered late. On a particular day there are 150 letters,
find the probability that no more than 5 letters will be delivered late;
25. Global Airlines knows that overall 3% of its passengers do not turn up for its flights. The
airline decides to adopt a policy of selling more tickets than there are seats on a flight. For
an aircraft with 196 seats, the airline sold 200 tickets for particularly flight. Find the
 probability that more than 196 passengers turn up for this flight.
26. 0.5% of the plastic ducks produced are found to be defective. What is the probability that in
a random sample of 500 articles there will be fewer than six defective ducks?