Spring 2019

GNE 331: Probability & Statistics

Problems

Exercise 1
There are n persons in a room. What is the probability that at least two persons have the same
birthday ignoring the possibility of February 29?
Exercise 2
A network company decides to give codes to its subscribers. These codes are formed of 8 digits.
a) Find the number of possible subscribers that the codes can accommodate.
b) Find the number of codes having 8 different digits.
c) Find the number of codes containing 2 different digits one appearing once and the other
seven times.
Exercise 3
Suppose that a laboratory test to detect a certain disease has the following statistics. Let A be
the event that the tested person has the disease and let B be the event that the test result is
positive. It is known that P(B/A)=0.99 and P(B/𝐴̅)=0.005 and 0.1% of the population actually
has the disease. What is the probability that a person has the disease given that the test result is
positive?
Exercise 4
The owner of a bookstore buys 4 newspapers at the price of 1200 LL each and sell it at 2000
LL. The next day, he sends back the unsold newspapers to the distributor and receives a 700
LL refund for each. Let X be the number of newspapers sold and Y the profit made by one day.
Assuming X has the following distribution,
x 0 1 2 3
1 1 1 1
f(x)
4 4 4 4

a) Find an expression of Y in terms of X.

b) Find the mean and variance of Y.
Exercise 5
The total number of hours, measured in units of 100 hours, that a family runs a vacuum cleaner
over a period of one year is a continuous random variable X that has the density function
𝑥 0<𝑥<1
𝑓(𝑥) = {2 − 𝑥 1≤𝑥<2
0 𝑒𝑙𝑠𝑒𝑤ℎ𝑒𝑟𝑒
Find the average number of hours per year that families run their vacuum cleaners.

1
Exercise 6
Suppose that X and Y have the following joint probability function:
f(x,y) X=2 X=4
Y=1 0.1 0.15
Y=3 0.2 0.3
Y=5 0.1 0.15

a) Find the expected value of g(X,Y)=XY2.

b) Find μX and μY.
Exercise 7
Given the following density function
2
𝑓(𝑥, 𝑦) = {3 (x + 2y) 0 ≤ 𝑥 ≤ 1, 0 ≤ 𝑦 ≤ 1
0 𝑒𝑙𝑠𝑒𝑤ℎ𝑒𝑟𝑒
Find the covariance.
Exercise 8
Given the following density function
1 −𝑥
𝑓(𝑥) = {20 𝑒 𝑥>0
20

0 𝑒𝑙𝑠𝑒𝑤ℎ𝑒𝑟𝑒
Find the mean and the variance.
Exercise 9
A random variable X has a mean μ = 10 and a variance σ2 = 4. Using Chebyshev’s theorem,
find
a) P(|X −10| < 3).
b) the value of the constant c such that P(|X −10|≥c) ≤ 0.04.