In: Statistics and Probability
Two fair dice are tossed. Let A be the maximum of the two numbers and let B be the absolute difference between the two numbers. Find the joint probability of A and B. Are A and B independent? How do you know?
Following is the sample space when we roll two fair dice:
In each outcome of the for (a,b) = c,d, first number a shows outcome of first die, second number b shows outcome of second die and c shows absolute difference and fourth number d shows the maximum of dice.
Each of the 36 outcomes are equally likely so the probability of each outcome will be 1/36.
Following table shows the joint pdf of A and B:
A | B | P(A=a, B=b) |
1 | 0 | 1/36 |
2 | 1 | 1/36 |
3 | 2 | 1/36 |
4 | 3 | 1/36 |
5 | 4 | 1/36 |
6 | 5 | 1/36 |
2 | 1 | 1/36 |
2 | 0 | 1/36 |
3 | 1 | 1/36 |
4 | 2 | 1/36 |
5 | 3 | 1/36 |
6 | 4 | 1/36 |
3 | 2 | 1/36 |
3 | 1 | 1/36 |
3 | 0 | 1/36 |
4 | 1 | 1/36 |
5 | 2 | 1/36 |
6 | 3 | 1/36 |
4 | 3 | 1/36 |
4 | 2 | 1/36 |
4 | 1 | 1/36 |
4 | 0 | 1/36 |
5 | 1 | 1/36 |
6 | 2 | 1/36 |
5 | 4 | 1/36 |
5 | 3 | 1/36 |
5 | 2 | 1/36 |
5 | 1 | 1/36 |
5 | 0 | 1/36 |
6 | 1 | 1/36 |
6 | 5 | 1/36 |
6 | 4 | 1/36 |
6 | 3 | 1/36 |
6 | 2 | 1/36 |
6 | 1 | 1/36 |
6 | 0 | 1/36 |
Now we need to combine same values to get the joint probability distribution:
A | ||||||||
1 | 2 | 3 | 4 | 5 | 6 | P(B=b) | ||
0 | 1/36 | 1/36 | 1/36 | 1/36 | 1/36 | 1/36 | 6/36 | |
1 | 0 | 2/36 | 2/36 | 2/36 | 2/36 | 2/36 | 10/36 | |
B | 2 | 0 | 0 | 2/36 | 2/36 | 2/36 | 2/36 | 8/36 |
3 | 0 | 0 | 0 | 2/36 | 2/36 | 2/36 | 6/36 | |
4 | 0 | 0 | 0 | 0 | 2/36 | 2/36 | 4/36 | |
5 | 0 | 0 | 0 | 0 | 0 | 2/36 | 2/36 | |
P(A=a) | 1/36 | 3/36 | 5/36 | 7/36 | 9/36 | 11/36 | 1 |
If A and B are independent then following must be true for each
values of A and B:
P(A=a, B=b) = P(A=a)P(B=b)
From above we have
P(A=1, B=0) = 1/36
P(A=1) = 1/36
P(B=0) = 6/36
Since P(A=1, B=0) is not equal to P(A=1)P(B=0) so A and B are not independent.