Probability is a of math of things that only sometimes happen; things that could be likely, or unlikely. Traditionally in math, we deal with constants, processes that are completely certain. For instance, when you add 3 and 3, you are always going to get 6, multiply 3 by 5, and you are always going to get 15. However, probability measures possibility, the numerical measure that an event will occur or the likelihood of occurrence.
In the real world, things are not always so predictable as the result you get from applying various math operations to numbers. Take a coin toss for example, when a coin is tossed, the outcome is either heads or tails, it is totally random, totally unpredictable (except you are a magician of some sort). So you will find in some cases that, people would often toss coins to help decide on an action to take between two options (well, good luck).
Despite the fact that we might not know what the outcome of a coin flip might be, we do know a few things about it;
- With a fair coin toss, heads is just as likely to show up as tails.
- The probability of an event(getting heads or tails) is a value that tells us how likely the event is to happen.
- With a coin toss, there is only two sides, and each side is just as likely to happen.
- When we run multiple coin toss experiment, we should expect that about half of it will be an outcome of heads, and the other half will be tails.
- This means that the probability of the event of either getting heads or tails is, one-half.
All probabilities are expressed between the values of 0 to 1. With 0 being impossible and 1 being certain.
GLOSSARY
EXPERIMENTS
An experiment is any process that generates well defined outcomes. Statistical experiments are random, not defined because, the outcomes cannot be defined.
SAMPLE SPACE
The sample space for an experiment is the set of all experimental outcomes. Here’ a visual; a soccer match has three possible outcomes in it’s sample space, namely; win, draw or lose. Each of these three outcomes is referred to as a sample point. Therefore, sample space = a set of all the possibilities.
EVENT
An event is a subset of a sample space. It is an outcome or defined collection of outcomes of a random experiment within a sample space. The probability of an event, is the number of ways an event can occur divided by the total number of possible outcomes.
RELEVANCE
Probability has a wide-spread range of applications. Some are:
- Probability is a way of making sense of things that are not quite clear.
- It gives basis for planning by providing realistic estimates.
- Weather patterns are used by meteorologists to predict the probability of a weather.
- It serves as a basis for decisions in trading chart analysis.
- Decisions become easier to make when you have a variety of options and can take only one.
Probability has become a subconscious parts of our lives especially, in decision making. The next time anyone asks me the use of all the math they learn is school, I will be sure to refer them to probability.
#MMBA3 #AVANTE-GARDE
