ECON 250 Chapter Notes - Chapter 4: Random Variable, Sample Space, Sampling Distribution

• School: Queen's University
• Department: Economics
• Course: ECON 250
• Professor: Jason Rhinelander

Document Summary

Chance behaviour is unpredictable in the short run but has a regular and predictable pattern in the long run. A phenomenon is random if individual outcomes are uncertain but there is nonetheless a regular distribution of outcomes in a large number of repetitions. The probability of any outcome of a random phenomenon is the proportion of times the outcome would occur in a very long series of operations. The sample space of a random phenomenon is the set of all possible outcomes: s is used to denote sample space. An event is an outcome or a set of outcomes of a random phenomenon: that is, an event is a subset of the sample space. A probability model is a mathematical description of a random phenomenon: the model has two parts: a sample space s and a way of assigning probabilities to events. Rule 1: the probability p(a) of any event a satisfies 0 < p(a) < 1.