Statistics class 3 additional exercises

Conditional Probability, Independence and Bayes’ Theorem

by Jeremy Orloff, Jonathan Bloom and Markus Mayer

Script exercises
Exercise 2:

Draw two cards from a deck. Define the events: S1 = ‘first card is a spade’ and S2 = ‘second
card is a spade’. What is the P (S2 |S1 )?

Exercise 3:

Draw two cards from a deck. Define the events: S1 = ‘first card is a spade’ and S2 = ‘second
card is a spade’. Verify the multiplication rule.

Exercise 4:

An urn contains 5 red balls and 2 green balls. Two balls are drawn one after the other. What is the
probability that the second ball is red?

Exercise 5:

An urn contains 5 red balls and 2 green balls. A ball is drawn. If it’s green a red ball is added to the
urn and if it’s red a green ball is added to the urn. (The original ball is not returned to the urn.)
Then a second ball is drawn. What is the probability the second ball is red?

Exercise 7:

Toss a fair coin twice. Let H1 = ‘heads on first toss’ and let H2 = ‘heads on second toss’. Are H1
and H2 independent?

Exercise 8:

Toss a fair coin 3 times. Let H1 = ‘heads on first toss’ and A = ‘two heads total’. Are H1 and A
independent?

Exercise 9:

Draw one card from a standard deck of playing cards. Examine the independence of the 3 events
‘the card is an ace’, ‘the card is a heart’ and ‘the card is red’.
Define the events as A = ‘ace’, H = ‘hearts’, R = ‘red’.

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Statistics class 3 exercises 2

Exercise 9:

Consider a routine screening test for a disease. Suppose the frequency of the disease in the population
(base rate) is 0.5%. The test is fairly accurate with a 5% false positive rate and a 10% false negative
rate.
You take the test and it comes back positive. What is the probability that you have the disease?

Note by Prof. Mayer: These questions are in part the work of the original authors (Jeremy Orloff and Jonathan Bloom) and
of the lecturer.
The original exercises (and more: slides, exams, question sheets, and solutions) can be downloaded at MIT OpenCourseWare:
Introduction To Probability And Statistics, 18.05, Spring 2014, Undergraduate
The OpenCourseWare material is distributed under the following Terms of use and license:
https://ocw.mit.edu/pages/privacy-and-terms-of-use/

Prof. Mayer thanks Jeremy Orloff and Jonathan Bloom not only for making the course material open to the public, but also
for giving him access to the original LaTeX sources to tailor the material better to the DITs needs. Without their help, this
course would by far not have the quality of its current state.