Lab 4.2: Glossary

Bernoulli trial: An occurrence in which exactly one of two possible outcomes can occur. Flipping a coin once is a Bernoulli since either a H or a T can occur. To maintain a consistent description, we will always call one of the outcomes "success" and the other "failure". We will always let p denote the probability of "success".

Binomial trial: A sequence of n independent Bernoulli trials, each having the same probability of "success", p.

Binomial random variable: A binomial random variable counts the number of "successes" in a binomial trial.

Binomial distribution model: Also called simply a binomial distribution, a binomial distribution model describes the pattern of variation of a binomial random variable. The binomial distribution model is characterized by the parameters n and p in the binomial trial. The probability mass function of the binomial distribution model with parameters n and p is

where equals n!/y!(n-y)!