March 2018
Beginner to intermediate
570 pages
13h 42m
English
Content preview from Data Analysis with R, Second Edition - Second Edition
Become an O’Reilly member and get unlimited access to this title plus top books and audiobooks from O’Reilly and nearly 200 top publishers, thousands of courses curated by job role, 150+ live events each month,
Start your free trial
The binomial distribution
The binomial distribution is a fun one. Like our uniform distribution described in the previous section, it is discrete.
When an event has two possible outcomes, success or failure, this distribution describes the number of successes in a certain number of trials. Its parameters are n, the number of trials, and p, the probability of success.
Concretely, a binomial distribution with n=1 and p=0.5 describes the behavior of a single coin flip-if we choose to view heads as successes (we could also choose to view tails as successes). A binomial distribution with n=30 and p=0.5 describes the number of heads we should expect:
Figure 4.2: A binomial distribution (n=30, p=0.5)
On average, of course, we would expect to have ...