How Is the Conditional PMF Calculated for Car Arrivals at a Toll Station?

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SUMMARY

The conditional probability mass function (pmf) for car arrivals at a toll station, given that five cars arrived in a three-minute interval, is derived from the properties of the Poisson process. With a rate of α = 5 cars per minute, the conditional pmf for the number of cars arriving in the first minute can be calculated using the multinomial distribution. This is due to the independent increments property of the Poisson process, which allows for the distribution of arrivals to be uniformly distributed across the time intervals.

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Suppose that cars traveling at night on a freeway arrive at a toll station according to a Poisson process with rate alpha @=5 per minute. If five cars arrived in [0,3] (that is, during a three minute period starting at midnight), what is the conditional pmf of the number of cars that arrived in [0,1] (during the first minute of the period)?
 
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What do you mean by pmf? Probability mass function?

Anyways, You condition on the even that up t=3 five cars arrived. what do you know about the conditional distribution of the arrival times of these five cars?

Hint: It's a famous property of the Poisson process because of which it is sometimes referred to as the "most random" point process of all.
 

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