Introduction to Probability, Autumn 2012 Exercise sheet 2 To be discussed in the workshops on Thursday 18/10/12.

To be handed in by Tuesday 23/10/12, 2pm to the MPS School oce. 1. Ninety percent of children are vaccinated. Ten per cent of unvaccinated children will catch measles, as will one in 200 of vaccinated children. Find the probability that someone had been vaccinated, conditional on them catching measles. 2. There are 15 tennis balls in a box, of which 9 have not been previously used. Three of the balls are randomly chosen, played with, and then returned to the box. Later another 3 balls are randomly chosen from the box. Find the probability that none of these balls has ever been used. 3. An urn initially has one red ball. Persephone uses a device to select n blue balls with probability e n /n!, for n = 0, 1, 2, . . . , and add them to the urn. She then selects one ball at random from the urn. Show that the probability that she selects the red ball is (1 e )/. 4. For each of the following probability statements, either give a counterexample or prove it true in general: (a) P (A|B ) + P (Ac |B c ) = 1; (b) P (A|B ) + P (A|B c ) = 1; (c) P (A|B ) + P (Ac |B ) = 1. If a statement is false, you will be able to nd a counterexample by considering outcomes from one throw of a fair die. 5. Work with wild animal populations often involves tagging animals and monitoring them subsequently. One problem with this is that animals can lose their tags, and it is dicult to estimate the rate at which that happens as in eld observation it is not practicable to distinguish an animal that has never been tagged from one that has lost its tag. The paper by G. F. Hubert, Jr., G. L. Storm, R. L. Phillips and R. D. Andrews, Ear tag loss in red foxes (J. Wildlife Mgmt. 40(1976), 164167) discussed a method to overcome this diculty. Identical tags were placed on both the left ear and the right ear of wild foxes, and after a period of time the proportion of tagged foxes that had just one tag left was observed. Consider the two events L = {left ear tag lost} and R = {right ear tag lost}. Assume L and R are independent and have the same probability p = P (L) = P (R). Derive an expression for the probability that exactly one tag is lost given that at most one is lost. How would you use this, with the data obtained as described in the previous paragraph, to estimate p?