Solved: A candidate for public office has claimed that 60% of voters will vote for her. If 5 registered voters were sampled

A candidate for public office has claimed that 60% of voters will vote for her. If 5 registered voters were sampled,

1. What is the probability distribution function for this voting?
2. What is the probability that exactly 3 would say they favor this candidate?
3. Calculate the mean and standard deviation of the probability distribution.

Solution

Let $X$ denote the number of voters who votes for her out of 5 sampled registered voters. A candidate for public office has claimed that 60% of voters will vote for her. That is $p = 0.60$ probability that a randomly selected candidate vote for her.

1. Here $n = 5$ and $p=0.60$. The probability distribution of $X$ is Binomial distribution. That is $X\sim B(5,0.60)$.

The probability mass function of $X$ is

$$ \begin{aligned} P(X=x) &= \binom{5}{x} (0.6)^x (1-0.6)^{5-x},\\ &\qquad \; x=0,1,\cdots, 5. \end{aligned} $$
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2. The probability that $X$ is exactly $3$ is

$$ \begin{aligned} P(X= 3) & =\binom{5}{3} (0.6)^{3} (1-0.6)^{5-3}\\ & = 0.3456\\ \end{aligned} $$

The probability that exactly 3 would say they favor this candidate is $P(X=3) = 0.3456$.

3. The mean of the probability distribution is $E(X) = np = 5 \times 0.6 = 3$.

The standard deviation of the probability distribution is $sd(X) = \sqrt{np(1-p)} = \sqrt{5 \times 0.6 \times (1- 0.6)} = 1.0954$.

Further Reading

• Statistics
• Descriptive Statistics
• Probability Theory
• Probability Distribution
• Hypothesis Testing
• Confidence interval
• Sample size determination
• Non-parametric Tests
• Correlation Regression
• Statistics Calculators