Comparing Binomial Probability to Poisson Random Variable Probability. A text file contains 6000 characters. When the file is sent by e-mail from one machine to another, each character (independently of all other characters) has probability 0.001 of being corrupted. Use a Poisson random variable to estimate the probability that the file is transferred without error.

amhailim

amhailim

Answered question

2022-09-17

Comparing Binomial Probability to Poisson Random Variable Probability
A text file contains 6000 characters. When the file is sent by e-mail from one machine to another, each character (independently of all other characters) has probability 0.001 of being corrupted. Use a Poisson random variable to estimate the probability that the file is transferred without error.
Compare this to the answer obtained when you model the number of errors as a binomial random variable.
For the binomial probability I got 0.2471%(to 4 significant figs).
For the Poisson probability I got 0.2478%(to 4 significant figs).
However I'm not sure how I'm supposed to compare them, clearly I can see that the binomial probability is slightly lower, but I don't understand why this is the case?

Answer & Explanation

Marnovdk

Marnovdk

Beginner2022-09-18Added 6 answers

Step 1
Let n = 6000, p = 1 1000 , and X p o i s ( n , p ). Then
P ( X = 0 ) = e n p = e 6 0.002478752.
Step 2
Now let Y B i n o m ( n , p ). Then
P ( Y = 0 ) = ( 1 p ) n 0.002471322.
Since the difference is 7.43006 × 10 6 , this is negligible.

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