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AMS131 - Take-home Midterm
Sunday, 4th May, 2014.
- You must explain all answers and/or show working for full credit.
- You may use your notes and the textbook, but please do not use resources found on the internet.
- This exam is to be completed individually.
1. [10 points] Emails arrive at a rate per hour. Let T be the random variable that is the time
of arrival of the rst email.
(a) By modeling the email arrivals as a Poisson process, and by considering the distribution
of the number of emails that arrive in time t, derive P(T t). Hence derive the CDF
of T, and show that the pdf of the waiting time is f
T
(t) = e
t
, t > 0.
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(b) Show that the variance of the waiting time is 1/
2
. You may assume the result that the
expected waiting time is 1/.
(c) You are waiting for an email, and have already waited time t
0
. What is the pdf of the
additional waiting time until the next email arrives? [Hint: nd P(T t +h|T t)]
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2. [5 points] To go with the Lego Movie, Lego sell minifgures of the characters from the movie.
They are sold in packets, where each packet contains one minigure, and from the outside
of the packet it is impossible to tell which minigure is inside. There are n minigures to
collect.
(a) Assuming that each packet that my son buys is equally likely to contain any one of the
minigures, show that the expected number of packets that he needs to buy to collect
the whole set is approximately nlog n.
[Hint: express the random variable that is the total number of packets as a sum of
simpler random variables, and use linearity of expectation.]
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