Quiz1 PDF
Quiz1 PDF
Quiz1 PDF
Problem 0: (3 points)
Write your name, your recitation instructor’s name, and TA’s name on the cover of the quiz booklet
and your 2 blue books. Include the question number on the cover of the blue book.
Consider a probabilistic model with a sample space Ω, a collection of events that are subsets of Ω,
and a probability law P() defined on the collection of events—all exactly as usual. Let A, B and
C be events.
Now let X and Y be random variables defined on the same probability space Ω as above.
(f) If for some constant c we have P({X > c}) = 12 , then E[X] > 2c . True False
In a simple game involving flips of a fair coin, you win a dollar every time you get a head. Suppose
that the maximum number of flips is 10, however, the game terminates as soon as you get a tail.
Let X be a uniformly distributed continuous random variable over some interval [a, b].
(h) We can uniquely describe fX (x) from knowing its mean and variance. True False
Let X be an exponentially distributed random variable with a probability density function fX (x) =
e−x .
Let X be a normal random variable with mean 1 and variance 4. Let Y be a normal random
variable with mean 1 and variance 1.
Please write all work for Problem 2 in your first blue book. No work recorded below will be
Borders Book store has been in business for 10 years, and over that period, the store has
collected transaction data on all of its customers. Various marketing teams have been busy using
the data to classify customers in hopes of better understanding customer spending habits.
Marketing Team A has determined that out of their customers, 1/4 are low frequency buyers
(i.e., they don’t come to the store very often). They have also found that out of the low frequency
buyers, 1/3 are high spenders (i.e., they spend a significant amount of money in the store), whereas
out of the high frequency buyers only 1/10 are high spenders. Assume each customer is either a low
or high frequency buyer, and each customer is either a high or low spender.
(a) Compute the probability that a randomly chosen customer is a high spender.
(b) Compute the probability that a randomly chosen customer is a high frequency buyer given
that he/she is a low spender.
You are told that the only products Borders sells are books, CDs, and DVDs. You are in-
troduced to Marketing Team B which has identified 3 customer groupings. These groups are
collectively exhaustive and mutually exclusive. They have also determined that each customer is
equally likely to be in any group, customers are i.i.d (independent and identically distributed), and
each customer buys only one item per day. They refer to the groupings as C1 , C2 , and C3 , and
have determined the following conditional probabilities:
(d) Compute the probability that a customer is in group C2 or C3 given he/she purchased a book.
Now in addition to the data from Marketing Team B, you are told that each book costs $15,
each CD costs $10, and each DVD costs $15.
(e) Compute the PMF, expected value and variance of the revenue (in dollars) Borders collects
from a single item purchase of one customer?
Massachusetts Institute of Technology
Department of Electrical Engineering & Computer Science
6.041/6.431: Probabilistic Systems Analysis
(Spring 2006)
(f) Suppose that n customers shop on a given day. Compute the expected value and variance of
the revenue Borders makes from these n customers.
(g) What’s the daily expected revenue from Skipper? What’s the variance of the daily revenue
from Skipper?
Massachusetts Institute of Technology
Department of Electrical Engineering & Computer Science
6.041/6.431: Probabilistic Systems Analysis
(Spring 2006)
Please write all work for Problem 3 in your second blue book. No work recorded below will be
We have s urns and n balls, where n ≥ s. Consider an experiment where each ball is placed in
an urn at random (i.e., each ball has equal probability of being placed in any of the urns). Assume
each ball placement is independent of other placements, and each urn can fit any number of balls.
Define the following random variables:
For each k = 0, 1, . . . , n, let Yk be the number of urns that have exactly k balls.
(a) Are the Xi ’s independent? Yes or No? Please explain your answer.
(c) For this question only assume n = 10 and s = 3. Find the probability that the first urn has
3 balls, the second has 2, and the third has 5.
i.e. compute P(X1 = 3 ∩ X2 = 2 ∩ X3 = 5)