Computing the

variance of a
discrete probability
distribution
Discrete distribution

 A discrete distribution describes the probability of occurrence of

each value of a discrete random variable. A discrete random
variable is a random variable that has countable values, such as a
list of non-negative integers.
 With a discrete probability distribution, each possible value of the
discrete random variable can be associated with a non-zero
probability. Thus, a discrete probability distribution is often presented
in tabular form.
Formula
Discrete Probability Distributions:
Equations & Examples
 How Much Ice Cream Can you Sell?
James has just started a new business selling ice cream from an ice
cream cart. His cart has a limited amount of space in it, so in the
beginning, he decided to start each day with 100 servings of vanilla
ice cream, 100 servings of chocolate ice cream, and 100 servings of
strawberry ice cream. However, after a few weeks, he notices that on
lots of days, he runs out of vanilla ice cream early and still has some
strawberry and chocolate left. He has to go home and refill his ice
cream cart with vanilla a long time before he runs out of the other
flavors. He thinks he could make more money and eliminate his extra
trips to resupply the ice cream cart if he could just figure out exactly
how much of each type of ice cream to stock each day.
 To solve his problem, James records the total amount of vanilla,
chocolate, and strawberry ice cream he sold each day for two
weeks. Each box of ice cream contains 10 servings, so James
recorded the number of servings he sold in groups of 10 since he
can't load just one serving at a time onto his cart. The data he
collected is shown in the table below:
Discrete Probability Distributions

 James first wants to estimate how much vanilla ice cream he should
put in his cart each morning, so he looks a little more closely at the
data for vanilla ice cream. He records how many times each
amount occurred during the last two weeks. Then, he calculates the
probability that he will use a certain amount on any given day. For
example, the probability that he will need 120 servings is 1/14, or
0.071.
 The number of ice cream servings that James should put in his cart is
an example of a discrete random variable because there are only
certain values that are possible (120, 130, 140, etc.), so this
represents a discrete probability distribution. If you add up all the
probabilities, you should get exactly one. This is true for all discrete
probability distributions.
0.071 + 0.071 + 0.143 + 0.143+ 0.214 + 0.071 + 0.143 + 0.143= 1.000
Expected Value Function

Using James's data, the expected value function gives:

E(x) = (120)(0.071) + (130)(0.071) + (140)(0.143) +
(150)(0.214) + (160)(0.071) + (170)(0.143) + (180)(0.143)
+ (190)(0.143)
E(x) = 8.57 + 9.29 + 20.00 + 21.43 + 34.29 + 12.14 +
25.71 + 27.14 = 158.57
The value given by the expected value function also
represents the mean of the data set. This means that, on
average, James can expect to need about 159 servings of
vanilla ice cream in his cart each day. Since each box
contains 10 servings, he can expect to use 16 boxes on
an average day.
Variance and Standard Deviation
of a Discrete Probability Function
 Now James knows exactly how much ice cream he will need on an
average day, but that means that on half of the days, he will still run
out of ice cream. He's not okay with that! One thing that might help
James is to calculate the standard deviation of his data. If data is
approximately normally distributed, then about 70% will fall within
one standard deviation.