Math 215 Lecture notes for 10/29/98: Poisson Distribution

The Poisson distribution is used for circumstances like the following: The number of airline crashes next year The number of people arriving at a drive-through window in the next hour The number of lightbulbs removed from inventory today The number of cars passing under a bridge in the next minute The number of people arriving at your store in the next hour The number of earthquakes of magnitude 4 or larger in Malibu in the next year The number of typographical errors in our textbook on a given page They are all in terms of number of a certain occurence in a certain interval of time (or space). They are all described by a random variable, in that there are many possible answers, and we dont know which one it is.

Compare with binomial

It is helpful to compare and contrast this distribution to the one you have already learned: the binomial distribution. Like the binomial distribution, these numbers are whole numbers, and such a random variable is a discrete random variable. (The number of airline crashes in the next year is a whole number, not a fraction.) Unlike the binomial distribution, it is an innite random variable. That is because (for instance) there is no upper limit to the number of cars that will pass under a bridge in the next minute. In both the binomial and the Poisson distribution, you ask how many times a certain occurence happens. In the binomial distribution, you (for instance) ip a coin a certain number of times and ask how many times heads appeared. Or more generally, there are a certain number of opportunities for the occurence to happen. In the Poisson distribution, a plane crash (for instance) may happen at any time. There is no such thing as a special opportunity when a plane might or might not crash. As opposed to the binomial distribution, when you ip a coin, and there is a special opportunity when a coin may come out heads or not: the moment you ip the coin. In the binomial distribution, we had two parameters: n and p that determined what kind of a problem we had. Now n was the number of ips of 1

the coin or special opportunities. Such a parameter does not exist with the Poisson distribution, since there are no special opportunities. Instead of the probability p, we have a dierent parameter that describes on average, how many events we should expect in that interval. We traditionally use the Greek letter lambda: , which you already encountered in Lagrange multipliers (this subject, by the way, has nothing to do with Lagrange multipliers. We just ran out Greek letters). In the binomial distribution, we assumed each ip was independent of the others. In the Poisson distribution, we assumed that an occurence happening at one time interval is independent of another occurence happening at a dierent time interval. This characterizes the examples given at the beginning of the notes.

The distribution formula

Just as with the binomial distribution, we have a formula for the probability of each outcome. Suppose we have a Poisson process like one described above: the number of a certain occurence happening in a given time interval. Suppose X denotes the number occurring in that interval, and denotes the average number (if you like, E (X )). Then the probability that X is equal to some whole number k is P r(X = k ) = k e . k!

Remember that e is our favorite number about 2.718282, and ex is our favorite function whose derivative is itself. Example 1 Cars enter the 101S onramp at Las Virgines at the average rate of 20 per minute. What is the probability that in the next minute, we will have 10 cars entering the 101S onramp at Las Virgines? Solution 1 Let X be the number of cars entering the 101S onramp at Las Virgines. It is true that X is a Poisson random variable. The parameter is equal to the average number that enter in a minute, which is 20. So the probability that X = 10 is P r(X = 10) = 2010 20 e = .0058 10!

Example 2 You manage a manufacturing plant, and orders for your product come in at random times, where the number in at time is independent of the number at another time. On average, you get 3 orders in a day. If you get more than 5 orders in a day, you experience a backlog. What is the probability of experiencing a backlog today? 2

Solution 2 We are actually asking, what is the probability that the number of orders is more than 5? Let X be the number of orders today. It is a Poisson random variable, with parameter equal to 3 (the average number of orders in a day). We would like to nd the probability of X > 5, which (in principle) involves adding up the probability for X = 6 to the probability for X = 7, and adding this to the probabililty for X = 8, and so on, ad innitum. I dont want to add an innite number of things together! But there is a good trick to remember. I can instead nd the probability of X 5, which involves only adding 6 terms (see below). It is the probability of getting 0 orders, plus the probability of getting one, and so on up to the probability of getting 5 orders. P r(X 5)

= P r(X = 0) + P r(X = 1) + P r(X = 2) + P r(X = 3) + P r(X = 4) + P r(X = 5) 30 3 31 3 32 3 33 3 34 3 35 3 e + e + e + e + e + e = 0! 1! 2! 3! 4! 5! 9 9 27 81 = e3 + 3e3 + e3 + e3 + e3 + e3 2 2 8 40 = .6671

This is the probability of not getting a backlog. Thus, the probability of getting a backlog is one minus this probability, or P r(X > 5) = 1 .6671 = .3329

Mean and variance

E (X ) V ar(X ) = = SD(X ) =

As already mentioned, if X is a Poisson random variable with parameter , then

Changing time intervals

Suppose we had the following problem: Example 3 On average, a certain store has 0.2 shoplifting incidents per day. What is the probability that there are two shoplifting incidents in a 4-day period? There are two comments worth making at the start. First, the average number of shoplifting incidents is not a whole number. Well, we never said it had to be a whole number. In fact, its not a number of incidents; its an average number

of incidents. An average of 0.2 is possible, if we get one shoplifting incident per day. The second comment is that there are two time intervals to worry about here. The average is given in terms of how many shoplifting incidents there are in a single day. The question is phrased, though, in terms of how many there are in a 4-day interval. Those time intervals are of dierent length. Solution 3 If there are 0.2 incidents in one day on average, then surely there are (0.2)(4) incidents in four days, on average. Thus = (0.2)(4) = 0.8. If X is the number of shoplifting incidents in the four-day interval, then P r(X = 2) = 0.82 0.8 e = .144 2!

Approximately Poisson

Recall that the dierence between Poisson and Binomial random variables was that in the Poisson random variable, the occurrence could happen at any time, while in the binomial random variable, there are special times when the occurence could happen. In some cases, the distinction is minimal: Example 4 On average, a typist produces 0.1 errors per page. What is the probability of the typist making no errors on a given page? Here we are counting how many errors occur. An occurence of an error is cannot happen at an arbitrary time; it can only happen each time the typist types a letter! Nevertheless, there are so many letters on a page that we can pretend an error can happen at any time. This approximation works well since the probability of an error on each letter is so small (on average, there are only 0.1 errors per page; imagine how few errors there are per letter!) in such a way that the average number to occur in the given interval is of moderate size (like 0.1). So the binomial and the Poisson random variables are approximately similar when the number of occurences is large and the probability is small. Solution 4 We imagine this is a Poisson random variable, with = 0.1; if X is the number of errors on a given page, P r(X = 0) = 0.10 0.1 e = e0.1 = 0.9048 0!