DISCRETE

STRUCTURES 2
 Module 6
DISCRETE PROBABILITY
Everything you have learned about counting
constitutes the basis for computing the probability of
events to happen.
In the following, it will use the notion experiment for
a procedure that yields one of a given set of possible
outcomes.
This set of possible outcomes is called the sample
space of the experiment.
An event is a subset of the sample space.
If all outcomes in the sample space are equally
likely, the following definition of probability applies:
The probability of an event E, which is a subset of a
finite sample space S of equally likely outcomes, is
given by p(E) = |E|/|S|.
Probability values range from 0 (for an event that
will never happen) to 1 (for an event that will always
happen whenever the experiment is carried out).
Example No. 1
•A standard deck has four suits: spades (), hearts (),
diamonds (), and clubs (). It has thirteen cards in
each suit: ace, 2, 3, . . ., 10, jack, queen, and king. Each
of these cards is equally likely to be drawn. Find the
probability of drawing:
a. a king
b. a heart
c. a face card
Example No. 2
•Dice (singular is die) are cubes that have spots on each
side. Find the probability of drawing:
a. a four
b. a seven
c. less than 7
d. greater than or equal to 5
Example No. 3
An urn contains four blue balls and five red balls.
What is the probability that a ball chosen from
the urn is blue?
Solution:
There are nine possible outcomes, and the event
“blue ball is chosen” comprises four of these
outcomes. Therefore, the probability of this event is
4/9 or approximately 44.44%.
Example No. 4
What is the probability of winning the lottery 6/49,
that is, picking the correct set of six numbers out of
49?
Solution:
There are C(49, 6) possible outcomes. Only one of
these outcomes will actually make us win the lottery.
p(E) = 1/C(49, 6) = 1/13,983,816
These examples lead to four rules or facts about
probability:
1. The probability of an event that cannot occur is
2. The probability of an event that must occur is 1.
3. Every probability is a number between 0 and 1
inclusive.
4. The sum of the probabilities of all possible
outcomes of an experiment is 1.
Let E be an event in a sample space S. The
probability of an event –E, the complementary event
of E, is given by
p(-E) = 1 – p(E).
This can easily be shown:
p(-E) = (|S| - |E|)/|S| = 1 - |E|/|S| = 1 – p(E).
This rule is useful if it is easier to determine the
probability of the complementary event than the
probability of the event itself.
Example No. 1
Find the probability of tossing a die and not rolling a
4.
Example No. 2
•You flip a coin four times in a row. What is the
probability you get at least one heads?
Solution:
If our event A is “you get at least heads in four flips”,
then the complement A’ is “you don’t get any heads
in four flips,” which is another way of saying “you get
all tails.”
Now all we need to do is find the probability of our
complement, A’, and then subtract this from one.
P(four tails in a row) = ½*½*½*½ = 1/16
Therefore, the probability of at least one heads is:
P(at least one heads) = 1 – P(four tails in a row) = 1 –
1/16 = 15/16
Example No. 3
A sequence of 10 bits is randomly generated.
What is the probability that at least one of these
bits is zero?
Solution: There are 210 = 1024 possible outcomes of
generating such a sequence.
The event –E, “none of the bits is zero”, includes
only one of these outcomes, namely the sequence
1111111111.
Therefore, p(-E) = 1/1024.
Now p(E) can easily be computed as
p(E) = 1 – p(-E) = 1 – 1/1024 = 1023/1024.
A compound event is an event consisting of two or
more simple events. Examples of simple events are:
tossing a die and rolling a 5, picking a seven from a
deck of cards, or flipping a coin and having a heads
show up.
An example of a compound event is tossing a die and
rolling a 5 or an even number. The notation for this
kind of compound event is given by
This is the probability that event A or event B (or
both) will occur.
Notice however, if we want the probability of rolling
a 5 or rolling a number greater than 3. There are
three numbers greater than 3 on a die and one of
them is the 5. We cannot count the 5 twice. The
probability is given by:
Let E1 and E2 be events in the sample space S.
Then we have:
p(E1  E2) = p(E1) + p(E2)

Does this remind something?

Of course, the principle of inclusion-exclusion.

Example: What is the probability of a positive
integer selected at random from the set of
positive integers not exceeding 100 to be
divisible by 2 or 5?
Solution: E2: “integer is divisible by 2”
E5: “integer is divisible by 5”
E2 = {2, 4, 6, …, 100}
|E2| = 50
p(E2) = 0.5
E5 = {5, 10, 15, …, 100}
|E5| = 20
p(E5) = 0.2

E2  E5 = {10, 20, 30, …, 100}

|E2  E5| = 10
p(E2  E5) = 0.1
p(E2  E5) = p(E2) + p(E5) – p(E2  E5 )
p(E2  E5) = 0.5 + 0.2 – 0.1 = 0.6
Independent events are events in which the
occurrence of the events will not affect the
probability of the occurrence of any of the other
events.
When we conduct two independent events we can
determine the probability of a given outcome in the
first event followed by another given outcome in the
second event.
An example of this is picking a color from a set of
crayons, then tossing a die. Separately, each of these
events is a simple event and the selection of a color
does not affect the tossing of a die.
Find the probability of picking red and rolling a 5.
The multiplication rule for independent events can be
stated as:

This rule can be extended for more than two

independent events:
•Dependent events are events that are not independent.
The occurrence of one event affects the probability of
the occurrence of other events. An example of
dependent events is picking a card from a standard deck
then picking another card from the remaining cards in
the deck.
For instance, what is the probability of picking two
kings from a standard deck of cards? The probability
of the first card being a king is .

However, the probability of the second card depends

on whether or not the the first card was a king
If the first card was a king then the probability of the second
card being a king is .
If the first card was not a king, the probability of the second
card being a king is .
Therefore, the selection of the first card affects the
probability of the second card.
If A and B are the two events, we can express the
probability that B will occur if A has already occurred
by using the notation:

This notation is generally read as “the probability of

B, given A.
The multiplication rule can now be expanded to
include dependent events. The rule now reads:
P ( A and B ) = P ( A)  P (B|A)
Of course, if A and B are independent, then:
P (B|A) = P (B )
In a group of 25 people 16 of them are married and 9
are single, what is the probability that if two people
are randomly selected from the group, they are both
married?
16 15 2
P ( A and B ) =  =
25 24 5
What happens if the outcomes of an experiment are not
equally likely?
In that case, we assign a probability p(s) to each
outcome sS, where S is the sample space.
Two conditions have to be met:
(1): 0  p(s)  1 for each sS, and
(2): sS p(s) = 1
This means, as we already know, that (1) each
probability must be a value between 0 and 1, and (2) the
probabilities must add up to 1, because one of the
outcomes is guaranteed to occur.
How it can obtain these probabilities p(s) ?
The probability p(s) assigned to an outcome s equals
the limit of the number of times s occurs divided by
the number of times the experiment is performed.
Once it know the probabilities p(s), it can compute
the probability of an event E as follows:
p(E) = sE p(s)
Example I: A die is biased so that the number 3
appears twice as often as each other number.
What are the probabilities of all possible outcomes?
Solution: There are 6 possible outcomes s1, …, s6.
p(s1) = p(s2) = p(s4) = p(s5) = p(s6)
p(s3) = 2p(s1)
Since the probabilities must add up to 1, we have:
5p(s1) + 2p(s1) = 1
7p(s1) = 1
p(s1) = p(s2) = p(s4) = p(s5) = p(s6) = 1/7, p(s3) = 2/7
Example II: For the biased die from Example I, what
is the probability that an odd number appears when
we roll the die?
Solution:
Eodd = {s1, s3, s5}
Remember the formula p(E) = sE p(s).
p(Eodd) = sE p(s) = p(s1) + p(s3) + p(s5)
odd

p(Eodd) = 1/7 + 2/7 + 1/7 = 4/7 = 57.14%

If we toss a coin three times, what is the probability that
an odd number of tails appears (event E), if the first toss
is a tail (event F) ?
If the first toss is a tail, the possible sequences are TTT,
TTH, THT, and THH.
In two out of these four cases, there is an odd number of
tails.
Therefore, the probability of E, under the condition that
F occurs, is 0.5.
We call this conditional probability.
If we want to compute the conditional probability of
E given F, we use F as the sample space.
For any outcome of E to occur under the condition
that F also occurs, this outcome must also be in
E  F.
Definition: Let E and F be events with p(F) > 0.
The conditional probability of E given F, denoted by
p(E | F), is defined as
p(E | F) = p(E  F)/p(F)
Example: What is the probability of a random bit
string of length four to contain at least two
consecutive 0s, given that its first bit is a 0 ?
Solution:
E: “bit string contains at least two consecutive 0s”
F: “first bit of the string is a 0”
The formula p(E | F) = p(E  F)/p(F).
E  F = {0000, 0001, 0010, 0011, 0100}
p(E  F) = 5/16
p(F) = 8/16 = 1/2
p(E | F) = (5/16)/(1/2) = 10/16 = 5/8 = 0.625
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https://www.inf.ed.ac.uk/teaching/courses/dmmr/slides/18-19/intro-Ch7.pdf

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https://www.onlinemathlearning.com/dependent-events.html

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