In probability and statistics, an urn problem is an idealized mental exercise in which some objects of real interest (such as atoms, people, cars, etc.) are represented as colored balls in an urn or other container. One pretends to remove one or more balls from the urn; the goal is to determine the probability of drawing one color or another, or some other properties. A number of important variations are described below.
An urn model is either a set of probabilities that describe events within an urn problem, or it is a probability distribution, or a family of such distributions, of random variables associated with urn problems. [1]
In Ars Conjectandi (1713), Jacob Bernoulli considered the problem of determining, given a number of pebbles drawn from an urn, the proportions of different colored pebbles within the urn. This problem was known as the inverse probability problem, and was a topic of research in the eighteenth century, attracting the attention of Abraham de Moivre and Thomas Bayes.
Bernoulli used the Latin word urna , which primarily means a clay vessel, but is also the term used in ancient Rome for a vessel of any kind for collecting ballots or lots; the present-day Italian or Spanish word for ballot box is still urna . Bernoulli's inspiration may have been lotteries, elections, or games of chance which involved drawing balls from a container, and it has been asserted that elections in medieval and renaissance Venice, including that of the doge, often included the choice of electors by lot, using balls of different colors drawn from an urn. [2]
In this basic urn model in probability theory, the urn contains x white and y black balls, well-mixed together. One ball is drawn randomly from the urn and its color observed; it is then placed back in the urn (or not), and the selection process is repeated. [3]
Possible questions that can be answered in this model are:
In probability theory and statistics, the binomial distribution with parameters n and p is the discrete probability distribution of the number of successes in a sequence of n independent experiments, each asking a yes–no question, and each with its own Boolean-valued outcome: success or failure. A single success/failure experiment is also called a Bernoulli trial or Bernoulli experiment, and a sequence of outcomes is called a Bernoulli process; for a single trial, i.e., n = 1, the binomial distribution is a Bernoulli distribution. The binomial distribution is the basis for the binomial test of statistical significance.
In probability theory and statistics, the negative binomial distribution is a discrete probability distribution that models the number of failures in a sequence of independent and identically distributed Bernoulli trials before a specified/constant/fixed number of successes occur. For example, we can define rolling a 6 on some dice as a success, and rolling any other number as a failure, and ask how many failure rolls will occur before we see the third success. In such a case, the probability distribution of the number of failures that appear will be a negative binomial distribution.
In probability and statistics, a probability mass function is a function that gives the probability that a discrete random variable is exactly equal to some value. Sometimes it is also known as the discrete probability density function. The probability mass function is often the primary means of defining a discrete probability distribution, and such functions exist for either scalar or multivariate random variables whose domain is discrete.
In probability theory and statistics, the hypergeometric distribution is a discrete probability distribution that describes the probability of successes in draws, without replacement, from a finite population of size that contains exactly objects with that feature, wherein each draw is either a success or a failure. In contrast, the binomial distribution describes the probability of successes in draws with replacement.
In probability theory, the multinomial distribution is a generalization of the binomial distribution. For example, it models the probability of counts for each side of a k-sided dice rolled n times. For n independent trials each of which leads to a success for exactly one of k categories, with each category having a given fixed success probability, the multinomial distribution gives the probability of any particular combination of numbers of successes for the various categories.
In probability and statistics, the Dirichlet distribution, often denoted , is a family of continuous multivariate probability distributions parameterized by a vector of positive reals. It is a multivariate generalization of the beta distribution, hence its alternative name of multivariate beta distribution (MBD). Dirichlet distributions are commonly used as prior distributions in Bayesian statistics, and in fact, the Dirichlet distribution is the conjugate prior of the categorical distribution and multinomial distribution.
In the field of information retrieval, divergence from randomness (DFR), is a generalization of one of the very first models, Harter's 2-Poisson indexing-model. It is one type of probabilistic model. It is used to test the amount of information carried in documents. The 2-Poisson model is based on the hypothesis that the level of documents is related to a set of documents that contains words that occur in relatively greater extent than in the rest of the documents. It is not a 'model', but a framework for weighting terms using probabilistic methods, and it has a special relationship for term weighting based on the notion of elite
Lottery mathematics is used to calculate probabilities of winning or losing a lottery game. It is based primarily on combinatorics, particularly the twelvefold way and combinations without replacement.
In probability theory and statistics, the beta-binomial distribution is a family of discrete probability distributions on a finite support of non-negative integers arising when the probability of success in each of a fixed or known number of Bernoulli trials is either unknown or random. The beta-binomial distribution is the binomial distribution in which the probability of success at each of n trials is not fixed but randomly drawn from a beta distribution. It is frequently used in Bayesian statistics, empirical Bayes methods and classical statistics to capture overdispersion in binomial type distributed data.
In probability theory, Dirichlet processes are a family of stochastic processes whose realizations are probability distributions. In other words, a Dirichlet process is a probability distribution whose range is itself a set of probability distributions. It is often used in Bayesian inference to describe the prior knowledge about the distribution of random variables—how likely it is that the random variables are distributed according to one or another particular distribution.
In probability theory and statistics, the Dirichlet-multinomial distribution is a family of discrete multivariate probability distributions on a finite support of non-negative integers. It is also called the Dirichlet compound multinomial distribution (DCM) or multivariate Pólya distribution. It is a compound probability distribution, where a probability vector p is drawn from a Dirichlet distribution with parameter vector , and an observation drawn from a multinomial distribution with probability vector p and number of trials n. The Dirichlet parameter vector captures the prior belief about the situation and can be seen as a pseudocount: observations of each outcome that occur before the actual data is collected. The compounding corresponds to a Pólya urn scheme. It is frequently encountered in Bayesian statistics, machine learning, empirical Bayes methods and classical statistics as an overdispersed multinomial distribution.
In probability theory and statistics, a categorical distribution is a discrete probability distribution that describes the possible results of a random variable that can take on one of K possible categories, with the probability of each category separately specified. There is no innate underlying ordering of these outcomes, but numerical labels are often attached for convenience in describing the distribution,. The K-dimensional categorical distribution is the most general distribution over a K-way event; any other discrete distribution over a size-K sample space is a special case. The parameters specifying the probabilities of each possible outcome are constrained only by the fact that each must be in the range 0 to 1, and all must sum to 1.
In statistics, the hypergeometric distribution is the discrete probability distribution generated by picking colored balls at random from an urn without replacement.
In probability theory and statistics, Wallenius' noncentral hypergeometric distribution is a generalization of the hypergeometric distribution where items are sampled with bias.
In probability theory and statistics, Fisher's noncentral hypergeometric distribution is a generalization of the hypergeometric distribution where sampling probabilities are modified by weight factors. It can also be defined as the conditional distribution of two or more binomially distributed variables dependent upon their fixed sum.
In statistics, a Pólya urn model, named after George Pólya, is a family of urn models that can be used to interpret many commonly used statistical models.
In probability theory, a beta negative binomial distribution is the probability distribution of a discrete random variable equal to the number of failures needed to get successes in a sequence of independent Bernoulli trials. The probability of success on each trial stays constant within any given experiment but varies across different experiments following a beta distribution. Thus the distribution is a compound probability distribution.
In probability theory and statistics, the negative hypergeometric distribution describes probabilities for when sampling from a finite population without replacement in which each sample can be classified into two mutually exclusive categories like Pass/Fail or Employed/Unemployed. As random selections are made from the population, each subsequent draw decreases the population causing the probability of success to change with each draw. Unlike the standard hypergeometric distribution, which describes the number of successes in a fixed sample size, in the negative hypergeometric distribution, samples are drawn until failures have been found, and the distribution describes the probability of finding successes in such a sample. In other words, the negative hypergeometric distribution describes the likelihood of successes in a sample with exactly failures.
In probability theory and statistics, the Dirichlet negative multinomial distribution is a multivariate distribution on the non-negative integers. It is a multivariate extension of the beta negative binomial distribution. It is also a generalization of the negative multinomial distribution (NM(k, p)) allowing for heterogeneity or overdispersion to the probability vector. It is used in quantitative marketing research to flexibly model the number of household transactions across multiple brands.