Math 5710
Independent Events
What does it mean for two events A and B to be independent?
Example 1: Toss a fair coin
twice. Event A is “heads on first toss”, event B is “tails on second toss”, and event C is “tails on first toss”. Are
these three events independent?
Example 2: Roll a pair of
fair dice. Event A is “sum is 7”, event B
is “first die is 4”, event C is
“second die is 3”. Are these three
events independent?
What does it mean for three or more events to be independent?
Three events A , B , and C
are independent provided
Events
are independent
provided the probability of any k of
them occurring is equal to the product of the probabilities.