LECTURE NOTES
ON PROBABILITY THEORY
Dr. Mriganka Sekhar Dutta
Assistant Professor
Nalbari College
EXAMPLE : How many
words of length k
can be formed from
a set of n (distinct) characters ,
(where k ≤ n ) ,
when letters can be used at most once ?
SOLUTION :
n (n − 1) (n − 2) · · · (n − (k − 1))
= n (n − 1) (n − 2) · · · (n − k + 1)
n!
= ( Why ? )
(n − k)!
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E X A M P L E : Three-letter words are generated randomly from the
five characters a , b , c , d , e , where letters can be used at most
once.
(a) How many three-letter words are there in the sample space S ?
SOLUTION : 5 · 4 · 3 = 60 .
(b) How many words containing a , b are there in S ?
S O L U T I O N : First place the characters
a,b
i.e., select the two indices of the locations to place them.
This can be done in
3 × 2 = 6 ways . ( Why ? )
There remains one position to be filled with a c , d or an e .
Therefore the number of words is 3 × 6 = 18 .
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(c) Suppose the 60 solutions in the sample space are equally likely .
What is the probability of generating a three-letter word that
contains the letters a and b ?
SOLUTION :
18
= 0.3 .
60
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EXERCISE :
Suppose the sample space S consists of all five-letter words
having distinct alphabetic characters .
• How many words are there in S ?
• How many ”special” words are in S for which only the second
and the fourth character are vowels, i.e., one of {a, e, i, o, u, y} ?
• Assuming t he out comes in S to be equally likely, what is the
probability of drawing such a special word?
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Co mb inat io n s
Let S be a set containing n (distinct) elements.
Then
a combination of k elements from S ,
is
any selection of k elements from S ,
where order is not important .
(Thus the selection is a set .)
N O T E : By definition a set always has distinct elements .
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EXAMPLE :
There are three combinations of 2 elements chosen from the set
S = {a , b , c} ,
namely, the subsets
{a, b} , {a, c} , {b, c} ,
whereas there are six words of 2 elements from S ,
namely,
ab , ba , ac , ca , bc , cb .
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In general, given
a set S of n elements ,
the number of possible subsets of k elements from S equals
𝑛 n! .
≡
𝑘 k! (n − k)!
R E M A R K : The notation 𝑛 is referred to as
𝑘
”n choose k ”.
𝑛 n! n!
NOTE : = = = 1,
𝑘 n! (n − n)! n ! 0!
since 0! ≡ 1 (by “convenient definition” !) .
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PROOF :
First recall that there are
n!
n (n − 1) (n − 2) · · · (n − k + 1) =
(n − k)!
possible sequences of k distinct elements from S .
However, every sequence of length k has k! permutations of itself,
and each of these defines the same subset of S .
Thus the total number of subsets is
n! 𝑛
≡
k! (n − k)! 𝑘
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