1. Learn
    2. /
  2. Courses
    3. /
  3. Foundations of Probability in Python
  • 1

    Let's start flipping coins

    Free

    A coin flip is the classic example of a random experiment. The possible outcomes are heads or tails. This type of experiment, known as a Bernoulli or binomial trial, allows us to study problems with two possible outcomes, like “yes” or “no” and “vote” or “no vote.” This chapter introduces Bernoulli experiments, binomial distributions to model multiple Bernoulli trials, and probability simulations with the scipy library.

  • 2

    Calculate some probabilities

    In this chapter you'll learn to calculate various kinds of probabilities, such as the probability of the intersection of two events and the sum of probabilities of two events, and to simulate those situations. You'll also learn about conditional probability and how to apply Bayes' rule.

  • 3

    Important probability distributions

    Until now we've been working with binomial distributions, but there are many probability distributions a random variable can take. In this chapter we'll introduce three more that are related to the binomial distribution: the normal, Poisson, and geometric distributions.

  • 4

    Probability meets statistics

    No that you know how to calculate probabilities and important properties of probability distributions, we'll introduce two important results: the law of large numbers and the central limit theorem. This will expand your understanding on how the sample mean converges to the population mean as more data is available and how the sum of random variables behaves under certain conditions. We will also explore connections between linear and logistic regressions as applications of probability and statistics in data science.

Initializing

Exercise

Highway accidents example

On a certain turn on a very busy highway, there are 2 accidents per day. Let's assume the number of accidents per day can be modeled as a Poisson random variable and is distributed as in the following plot:

Probability mass function

For your convenience, the poisson object has already been imported from the scipy.stats library.

Aiming to improve road safety, the transportation agency of the regional government has assigned you the following tasks.

Instructions 1/4

undefined XP
  • 1

    Determine and print the probability of there being 5 accidents on any day.

  • 2

    Determine and print the probability of having 4 or 5 accidents on any day.

  • 3

    Determine and print the probability of having more than 3 accidents on any day.

  • 4

    Determine and print the number of accidents that is likely to happen with 0.75 probability.