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Full-Text Articles in Probability

Selecting Without Replacement From A Population Of Bands Of Serially Connected Objects, James E. Marengo, Dominick Banasik, Joseph Voelkel, David L. Farnsworth Mar 2026

Selecting Without Replacement From A Population Of Bands Of Serially Connected Objects, James E. Marengo, Dominick Banasik, Joseph Voelkel, David L. Farnsworth

Articles

The sampling procedure from a finite population of objects that are serially attached into bands is described and analyzed. One object is randomly selected and removed at a time, which results in that object’s band being broken into two bands or shortened by one object. The main result gives the probability of choosing an object that is part of a band of serially connected objects of any specified size at each stage of the selection process.


The Bandages Problem, James E. Marengo, Joseph G. Voelkel, David L. Farnsworth Aug 2025

The Bandages Problem, James E. Marengo, Joseph G. Voelkel, David L. Farnsworth

Articles

A new probability problem, named the Bandages Problem, is described and solved. The problem involves repeatedly selecting and removing an item at random from a finite population that initially consists of a known configuration of single and paired items. For each selection, the probability that the chosen item is single is found. Generalizations are suggested.


Probability Models With Discrete And Continuous Parts, James E. Marengo, David L. Farnsworth Feb 2022

Probability Models With Discrete And Continuous Parts, James E. Marengo, David L. Farnsworth

Articles

In mathematical statistics courses, students learn that the quadratic function E ((X – x )-squared) is minimized when x is the mean of the random variable X, and that the graphs of this function for any two distributions of X are simply translates of each other. We focus on the problem of minimizing the function defined by y ( x) = E ( IX – xI-squared ) in the context of mixtures of probability distributions of the discrete, absolutely continuous, and singular continuous types. This problem is important, for example, in Bayesian statistics, when one attempts to compute the decision …


Probability Models And Compounding, David L. Farnsworth, James E. Marengo Dec 2017

Probability Models And Compounding, David L. Farnsworth, James E. Marengo

Articles

We present the case that the ideas contained in a particular sequence of formulas are important in probability and statistics. The synthesis offered by the concepts in the sequence can be very valuable. Facility with this sequence and its underpinnings should be in the skill set of anyone who uses or studies probability or statistics. For illustrative purposes, we give applications to mixture distributions and Bayesian analyses.


A Geometric Derivation Of The Irwin-Hall Distribution, James E. Marengo, Lucas Stefanic, David L. Farnsworth Sep 2017

A Geometric Derivation Of The Irwin-Hall Distribution, James E. Marengo, Lucas Stefanic, David L. Farnsworth

Articles

The Irwin-Hall distribution is the distribution of the sum of a finite number of independent identically distributed uniform random variables on the unit interval. Many applications arise since round-off errors have a transformed Irwin-Hall distribution and the distribution supplies spline approximations to normal distributions. We review some of the distribution’s history. The present derivation is very transparent, since it is geometric and explicitly uses the inclusion-exclusion principle. In certain special cases, the derivation can be extended to linear combinations of independent uniform random variables on other intervals of finite length.The derivation adds to the literature about methodologies for finding distributions …


The Conditional Poisson Process And The Erlang And Negative Binomial Distributions, Anurag Agarwal, Peter Bajorski, David L. Farnsworth, James E. Marengo, Wei Qian Feb 2017

The Conditional Poisson Process And The Erlang And Negative Binomial Distributions, Anurag Agarwal, Peter Bajorski, David L. Farnsworth, James E. Marengo, Wei Qian

Articles

It is a well known fact that for the hierarchical model of a Poisson random variable Y whose mean has an Erlang distribution, the unconditional distribution of Y is negative binomial. However, the proofs in the literature provide no intuitive understanding as to why this result should be true. It is the purpose of this manuscript to give a new proof of this result which provides such an understanding. The memoryless property of the exponential distribution allows one to conclude that the events in two independent Poisson processes may be regarded as Bernoulli trials, and this fact is used to …