Probabilistic Methods for Bioinformatics

Chapter 3

Statistics Basics

This chapter reviews the statistics you need to read the remainder of this book. In Section 3.1 we present basic concepts in statistics such as expected value, variance, and maximum likelihood. Section 3.2 covers the Markov Chain Monte-Carlo (MCMC) approximation technique. Finally, Section 3.3 briefly reviews the normal distribution.

3.1 Basic Concepts

Next, we review several important statistical definitions.

3.1.1 Expected Value

Definition 3.1 Suppose we have a discrete numeric random variable X, whose space is

Then the expected value E(X) is given by

Example 3.1 Suppose we have a symmetric die such that ...