Probability question in telephone network failures

twoflower
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Hi,

I have this problem

Homework Statement



In telephone network, an average number of failures during a month for one telephone owner is 8. What is the probability that some telephone owner will experience more than 4 failures?

The Attempt at a Solution



I have no idea what distribution should I use to model this problem. So far I've come up with binomial distribution with probability of individual event 8/k, where k is number of connection the telephonist will make during a month.

But that seems really odd to me...

Could someone help please?

Thank you.
 
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So you have the situation where there are k trials (attempted calls), the probability of "success" (i.e. there is a fault) is 8/k, and k is probably large.

What distribution is an approximation to the Binomial(n,p) as n becomes large and np stays constant?
 
AlephZero said:
So you have the situation where there are k trials (attempted calls), the probability of "success" (i.e. there is a fault) is 8/k, and k is probably large.

What distribution is an approximation to the Binomial(n,p) as n becomes large and np stays constant?

One way is to approximate it with Poisson distribution, but can I solve it using Central Limit Theorem? Which one is better?
 
I tried to finish it using the Poisson distribution and it seems ok.

Anyway, using Central Limit Theorem I got result depending on n, is it ok?
 
Yeap, I think Poisson distribution is more appropriate here.
 
There are two things I don't understand about this problem. First, when finding the nth root of a number, there should in theory be n solutions. However, the formula produces n+1 roots. Here is how. The first root is simply ##\left(r\right)^{\left(\frac{1}{n}\right)}##. Then you multiply this first root by n additional expressions given by the formula, as you go through k=0,1,...n-1. So you end up with n+1 roots, which cannot be correct. Let me illustrate what I mean. For this...
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