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The practical problem of checking whether a coin is fair might be considered as easily solved by performing a sufficiently large number of trials, but statistics and probability theory can provide guidance on two types of question; specifically those of how many trials to undertake and of the accuracy of an estimate of the probability of ...
v. t. e. In probability theory and statistics, the Bernoulli distribution, named after Swiss mathematician Jacob Bernoulli, [1] is the discrete probability distribution of a random variable which takes the value 1 with probability and the value 0 with probability . Less formally, it can be thought of as a model for the set of possible outcomes ...
The entropy of the unknown result of the next toss of the coin is maximized if the coin is fair (that is, if heads and tails both have equal probability 1/2). This is the situation of maximum uncertainty as it is most difficult to predict the outcome of the next toss; the result of each toss of the coin delivers one full bit of information.
For example, a fair coin toss is a Bernoulli trial. When a fair coin is flipped once, the theoretical probability that the outcome will be heads is equal to 1 ⁄ 2. Therefore, according to the law of large numbers, the proportion of heads in a "large" number of coin flips "should be" roughly 1 ⁄ 2.
If a cheat has altered a coin to prefer one side over another (a biased coin), the coin can still be used for fair results by changing the game slightly. John von Neumann gave the following procedure: [4] Toss the coin twice. If the results match, start over, forgetting both results. If the results differ, use the first result, forgetting the ...
Hoeffding's inequality is a special case of the Azuma–Hoeffding inequality and McDiarmid's inequality. It is similar to the Chernoff bound, but tends to be less sharp, in particular when the variance of the random variables is small. [2] It is similar to, but incomparable with, one of Bernstein's inequalities.
Martingale (probability theory) In probability theory, a martingale is a sequence of random variables (i.e., a stochastic process) for which, at a particular time, the conditional expectation of the next value in the sequence is equal to the present value, regardless of all prior values. Stopped Brownian motion is an example of a martingale.
Probability theory. In probability and statistics, a Bernoulli process (named after Jacob Bernoulli) is a finite or infinite sequence of binary random variables, so it is a discrete-time stochastic process that takes only two values, canonically 0 and 1. The component Bernoulli variables Xi are identically distributed and independent.