Tuesday, August 21, 2012

Mutually Exclusive Events Illustrated


Mutually Exclusive Events Statistics, Let us assume that a card is picked from a deck of cards. Picking one card and choosing an ace or queen both at the same time is not possible. This type of events are called Mutually-exclusive events, two events are said to be mutually exclusive if it is not possible for them to occur together.  We can define mutually exclusive events as two events in which one event happening means it is not possible for the other event to happen. They have no common outcome.

Definition of Mutually Exclusive Events, the events that have no common outcome are defined as mutually-exclusive events or disjoint events. If two events are disjoint, then the probability of the both events to occur at the same time is zero and the sum of the probabilities of the two events is equal to one. Let us consider an example of rolling a six sided die. The sample space here would be 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6. Let the event A denote the occurrence of an even number and the event B denote the occurrence of an odd number. Here the probability of the both events to occur, that is, the number to be an even number and also odd number is zero and hence the two events, event A and event B are mutually-exclusive events, A intersection B is zero.

Mutually Exclusive Events Probability , some events have a unique relationship called the mutually exclusivity. Two events are said to be mutually exclusive if they cannot occur at the same time. For a given sample space, it is either one event or the other event but not both together. Mutually Exclusive Events Probability is defined as: P(A) +P(B) = 1. A very common example of mutually-exclusive events is the outcomes of a flip of a fair coin. When a fair coin is flipped, we either get a tail or head but not both together, it can be proved that these events are mutually-exclusive events by finding the sum of their probabilities, P(tail) +P(head)= 1/2 + 1/2=1.

We can say that, for any given pair of events, they are mutually-exclusive events if the sum of their probabilities is equal to one. From the definition of mutually-exclusive events, the multiplication rule of probability for mutually-exclusive events is P(A intersection B) is always zero. The addition rule applies to mutually exclusive events probability given by  P(A+B)=1 . The subtraction rule for mutually-exclusive events is given as P(A union B)’

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