Chapter 3 Exploring Probability Distributions
¶In the last chapter we learned to find the probabilities of individual outcomes or specific events in an experiment. We also confined ourselves to experiments with a discrete set of outcomes. We did this by analyzing each experiment in order to understand how to count the outcomes both in the sample space and in the event of interest.
You may have noticed that similar types of experiments required similar methods for counting and computing probabilities. In this chapter, we will take advantage of those similarities to develop formulas for computing probabilities for experiments in several different “families.” We will also extend our toolbox to include ways to compute probability for continuous sets of outcomes.