National University of Computer & Emerging Sciences

EE319: Probability & Random Processes

Sections: A, B, C, D (Spring 2015)
Friday
27 Mar 2015

Instructor: Aamer Munir

TAs: Usman Khalid (Batch-11), Neelam Nasir (Batch-12)

A04
Monday
6 Apr 2015

Name: _________________________________________ Roll No: _____________ Section: _____

All written assignments must have this as their first page.

IMPORTANT NOTES: Please read all the sections below and understand them well.
Assignments related:
1. Do the assignment yourself. It is more honorable to fail than to cheat.
2. ZERO Tolerance Policy for plagiarism and cheating. First cheating case gets zero.
Subsequent cheating case gets ZERO in all assignments.
3. A gross violation may be reported to the Department Discipline Committee (DDC).
4. Submit in class.
5. There is no retake or allocation of average marks for assignments in case you fail to submit
because of whatever reason, genuine or otherwise.
6. Best way to do assignment would be to revise lectures, do simple problems before jumping
to doing assignment problems. Someone who would directly do assignment problems will
generally be at a disadvantage.
7. You can discuss a question with me to understand it or discuss a strategy to attempt it.

Submission guidelines
Submissions failing to follow these guidelines will not be considered.
1. Submit hand written assignments. Computer prints are not acceptable.
2. Assignments should be done on A4 sized blank white (photocopy) paper (70g).
3. Multiple pages should be stapled.
4. No cover (file, transparent, ring binding etc) should be used.

Roll No: _____________

Objective: Basics of Discrete Random Variable

The objective of this assignment is to get an understanding of:
1. Basics of Random Variable
2. Probability Mass Function (PMF)
3. Expectation of a random variable, Expectation of a function of a RV (Expected Value Rule)
4. Linearity of Expectation
5. Variance of a random variable
Remember, for the doing of this assignment, you must use Random Variables and associated
knowledge to solve the problems.
Problem 1:
A possible result of an experiment is the event . The probability that this event occurs is . The
experiment is performed
times, the outcome of any trial is not affected by the results of the
previous trials. Define a random variable to be the number of times the event occurs in trials.
a) What is the PMF of the RV , i.e.,
b) Show that sum of the PMF over all
c) What is the name of this PMF?

( ).
is 1.

Problem 2:
is a random variable, defined by a PMF as follows:
( )=
a) Find .
b) Find PMF of

{3, 2, 1, 1, 2, 3}

Problem 3:
There are 4 buses carrying 40, 33, 25, and 50 students who are going to a student conference. A
student can be uniformly randomly chosen from the 148 total students. A driver can also be chosen
uniformly randomly. Let and be two random variables defined as follows:
: Number of students in the bus of the selected student
: Number of students in the bus of the selected driver
What do you expect to be higher: [ ], or [ ]?
a) Stretch the problem and think of an extreme case (obviously with a different number of buses
and students in them) such that the answer can be found convincingly but intuitively, i.e.,
without actually solving for the expectations.
b) Do it mathematically and see if the actual answer matches your intuition or not.
Problem 4:
A network has switches. Any switch can turn OFF and ON randomly. The turning ON or OFF is so
fast that it can be assumed to happen instantly. The probability that a switch is ON is .

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Roll No: _____________

a) Which mathematical object (number, Pr, RV, E, ) would you use to represent the
following?
i.
The number of switches in ON state.
ii.
The number of switches known to be in ON state.
iii.
The proportion of switches
that are ON.
iv.
The proportion of switches that are ON.
b) What is the expected number of switches that are ON?
c) Define a random variable to represent the state of a switch (assuming indistinguishable
switches) such that = 1 represents ON and = 0 for OFF. Which of the above four can
be written in terms of some property of .
You should be able to understand the difference between average and expectation from the
last two answers, if correct.
Problem 5:
Mathematically, prove that the expected value of a non-negative random variable, X is the sum over
all possible values X can take, of probabilities that X takes values greater or equal to a particular
value, k. That is:
[ ]=

Pr ( )

[Note: No such problem be expected in exams.]

Problem 6:
In a certain game of chance several prizes worth $1, $2, and $4 are given, with probabilities 0.5, 0.3
and 0.2, respectively. Each player gets a prize. What should I expect to walk back with, after 10
rounds of the game?
Problem 7:
In a game of chance, two rounds are played by 10 players. The same set of players play both of the
rounds. The outcome of each round is one prize of $1, one of $2, and one of $4. If a player does not
get a prize in any round, he has to pay $1 to the club. What should I expect to walk back with, after
playing 10 such two-round games?
Problem 8:
Two FYP groups at FAST are using the same data but they are using different units. Will the two
groups see the same PMF? If not, how are the two PMFs related?
Problem 9:
We have two fair three-sided dice, indexed by = 1, 2. Each die has sides labelled 1, 2, and 3.
We roll the two dice independently, one roll for each die. For = 1, 2, let the random variable
represent the result of the ith die, so that is uniformly distributed over the set {1, 2, 3}.
Define =
.
1. Calculate the numerical values of following probabilities, as well as the expected value and
variance of :
i.
( = 0) =
NUCES-FAST: Spr15: Probability (EE)

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Roll No: _____________

ii.
iii.
iv.
v.
vi.
2. Let
i.
ii.
iii.

(
(
(

= 1) =
= 2) =
= 3) =
[ ] =
( ) =
=
. Calculate the following probabilities:
( = 0) =
( = 1) =
( = 2) =

Problem 10:
The random variables X and Y have the joint PMF
,

( , )=

.( + ) ,
0,

{1, 2, 4}

{ 1, 3}

All answers in this problem should be numerical.

1. Find the value of the constant c.
2. Find

<

).

3. Find

).

4. Find the following probabilities.

(
(
(
(
5. Find the expectations [ ] and [

= 1) =
= 2) =
= 3) =
= 4) =

].

6. Find the variance of .

NUCES-FAST: Spr15: Probability (EE)

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