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Probability is the branch of mathematics and statistics concerning events and numerical descriptions of how likely they are to occur. The probability of an event is a number between 0 and 1; the larger the probability, the more likely an event is to occur.
In expected utility theory, a lottery is a discrete distribution of probability on a set of states of nature.The elements of a lottery correspond to the probabilities that each of the states of nature will occur, (e.g. Rain: 0.70, No Rain: 0.30). [1]
Let () be a probability distribution on the states of nature. From a Bayesian point of view, we would regard it as a prior distribution.That is, it is our believed probability distribution on the states of nature, prior to observing data.
The state is periodic if >; otherwise = and the state is aperiodic. A state i is said to be transient if, starting from i, there is a non-zero probability that the chain will never return to i. It is called recurrent (or persistent) otherwise. [48] For a recurrent state i, the mean hitting time is defined as:
In probability theory and statistics, a probability distribution is the mathematical function that gives the probabilities of occurrence of possible outcomes for an experiment. [1] [2] It is a mathematical description of a random phenomenon in terms of its sample space and the probabilities of events (subsets of the sample space). [3]
Methods of probability theory also apply to descriptions of complex systems given only partial knowledge of their state, as in statistical mechanics or sequential estimation. A great discovery of twentieth-century physics was the probabilistic nature of physical phenomena at atomic scales, described in quantum mechanics. [2]
If the state space is the integers or natural numbers, then the stochastic process is called a discrete or integer-valued stochastic process. If the state space is the real line, then the stochastic process is referred to as a real-valued stochastic process or a process with continuous state space.
In probability theory, an event is a set of outcomes of an experiment (a subset of the sample space) to which a probability is assigned. [1] A single outcome may be an element of many different events, [2] and different events in an experiment are usually not equally likely, since they may include very different groups of outcomes. [3]