SECTION 4.3 Summary
- The complement of an event contains all outcomes that are not in . The union { or } of events and contains all outcomes in , in , and in both and . The intersection { and } contains all outcomes that are in both and , but not outcomes in alone or alone.
- The conditional probability of an event , given an event , is defined by
when . In practice, conditional probabilities are most often found from directly available information.
- The essential general rules of elementary probability are
- Legitimate values: for any event
- Total probability 1:
- Complement rule:
- Addition rule:
- Multiplication rule:
- If and are disjoint, then . The general addition rule for unions then becomes the special addition rule, .
- and are independent when . The multiplication rule for intersections then becomes .
- In problems with several stages, draw a tree diagram to organize use of the multiplication and addition rules.
- If are disjoint events whose probabilities are not 0 and add to exactly 1 and if is any other event whose probability is not 0 or 1, then Bayes's rule can be used to calculate as follows: