Back বের্নুই পরীক্ষা Bengali/Bangla Assaig de Bernoulli Catalan Bernoulliho pokus Czech Provo de Bernoulli Esperanto Ensayo de Bernoulli Spanish Bernoulli saiakuntza Basque آزمایش برنولی Persian Binomitodennäköisyys Finnish Épreuve de Bernoulli French Bernoulli-teszt Hungarian
| Part of a series on statistics |
| Probability theory |
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Blue curve: Throwing a 6-sided die 6 times gives a 33.5% chance that 6 (or any other given number) never turns up; it can be observed that as n increases, the probability of a 1/n-chance event never appearing after n tries rapidly converges to 0.
Grey curve: To get 50-50 chance of throwing a Yahtzee (5 cubic dice all showing the same number) requires 0.69 × 1296 ~ 898 throws.
Green curve: Drawing a card from a deck of playing cards without jokers 100 (1.92 × 52) times with replacement gives 85.7% chance of drawing the ace of spades at least once.
In the theory of probability and statistics, a Bernoulli trial (or binomial trial) is a random experiment with exactly two possible outcomes, "success" and "failure", in which the probability of success is the same every time the experiment is conducted.[1] It is named after Jacob Bernoulli, a 17th-century Swiss mathematician, who analyzed them in his Ars Conjectandi (1713).[2]
The mathematical formalization and advanced formulation of the Bernoulli trial is known as the Bernoulli process.
Since a Bernoulli trial has only two possible outcomes, it can be framed as some "yes or no" question. For example:
- Is the top card of a shuffled deck an ace?
- Was the newborn child a girl? (See human sex ratio.)
Therefore, success and failure are merely labels for the two outcomes, and should not be construed literally. The term "success" in this sense consists in the result meeting specified conditions; it is not a value judgement. More generally, given any probability space, for any event (set of outcomes), one can define a Bernoulli trial, corresponding to whether the event occurred or not (event or complementary event). Examples of Bernoulli trials include:
- Flipping a coin. In this context, obverse ("heads") conventionally denotes success and reverse ("tails") denotes failure. A fair coin has the probability of success 0.5 by definition. In this case, there are exactly two possible outcomes.
- Rolling a die, where a six is "success" and everything else a "failure". In this case, there are six possible outcomes, and the event is a six; the complementary event "not a six" corresponds to the other five possible outcomes.
- In conducting a political opinion poll, choosing a voter at random to ascertain whether that voter will vote "yes" in an upcoming referendum.
- ^ Papoulis, A. (1984). "Bernoulli Trials". Probability, Random Variables, and Stochastic Processes (2nd ed.). New York: McGraw-Hill. pp. 57–63.
- ^ James Victor Uspensky: Introduction to Mathematical Probability, McGraw-Hill, New York 1937, page 45
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