Wednesday, September 8, 2010

Math at your fingertips

Definition of the binomial expansion

If, after the first game, you pick to play another one, you definitely expect the number of tosses you'll require to win this second game to be different from the number of tosses you needed to win the first one. So the number of tosses needed to win a game is a random
variable, whose distribution is named the negative binomial distribution.

The geometric terms therefore appears as the special cases of the negative binomial distribution for k = 1.

A negative binomial distribution is defined by one parameters :
* p, the probability for the coin to land on "Head",
* k, the number of "Heads" you require to get before stopping the game. This parameter is named the "size" of the distribution.

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