Agnostic.com

2 1

Being bit geeky. LoL
Didn't want to think about relationship and marriage or job successes. but..Was just trying to wrap my head around some probability distributions, specially negative binomial distribution. And then bumped onto this hilarious analogy on Quora.. A binomial distribution is basically the probability of your specific number of successes out of the total number you have tried. The negative binomial distribution focusses on failures instead..like.. how many times you need to try before you fail think number of times with occasional success in between, so your last trial is your k-th failure, you may have plenty of success before. Now the example..

"if you consider the number of people one has to ask out before getting in a real relationship, and the number of real relationships one has to be involved in before finding that person one wants to marry, it would be modeled almost perfectly by a negative binomial distribution. Or alternately, the number of job interviews one must go on before becoming employed, and the number of jobs one must hold before settling on a career… Anything which involves independent failures and successes before reaching a final state of one or the other is the definition of a negative binomial. Of course, in these two cases there are learning curves involved which make subsequent trials somewhat non-independent (messing up the negative binomial-ism of it a bit), but still…

Keep in mind, in statistics a ‘success’ is just the reverse of a failure, an entirely arbitrary distinction; it doesn’t have the valance that we put on the term in normal usage. A negative binomial is defined as “the number of successes in a sequence of independent and identically distributed Bernoulli trials before a specified number of failures occur”, but it could equally well apply to the number of failures before a specified number of successes occur. Be careful not to get confused by natural language distinctions."

AnandaKhan 6 Apr 11
Share

Enjoy being online again!

Welcome to the community of good people who base their values on evidence and appreciate civil discourse - the social network you will enjoy.

Create your free account

2 comments

Feel free to reply to any comment by clicking the "Reply" button.

1

Indeed.

3

You lost me after "Being bit geeky", 🙂

You can include a link to this post in your posts and comments by including the text q:55394
Agnostic does not evaluate or guarantee the accuracy of any content. Read full disclaimer.