[Math] Defective Widgets Problem (Probability)

combinationsprobability

Problem:

A shipment of 30 widgets includes 10 that are defective.

(a) In how many ways can you choose 6 of these widgets and receive exactly 2 defective ones?

(b) If 6 widgets (out of 30) are chosen at random, what is the probability that at most 2 of those selected will be defective?

(c) If a randomly chosen sample of 6 widgets (out of 30) is known to contain at least 1 defective widget, what is the probability that it contains exactly 3 defective widgets?


My Thoughts:

(a) $\dbinom{6}{2}\dbinom{24}{8} = 15 \cdot 735471 = 11032065$

(b) $P (D) = \frac{\dbinom{6}{1}\dbinom{24}{5}}{\dbinom{30}{6}} + \frac{\dbinom{6}{2}\dbinom{24}{4}}{\dbinom{30}{6}} = 506/725 = 0.6979$

(c) $P (D) = \frac{\dbinom{6}{1}\dbinom{24}{5}}{\dbinom{30}{6}} + \frac{\dbinom{6}{2}\dbinom{24}{4}}{\dbinom{30}{6}} + \frac{\dbinom{6}{3}\dbinom{24}{3}}{\dbinom{30}{5}} = 0.7661$

sorry for the bad formatting – I'm new to this site 🙁
I'm not sure that my answers are correct though I feel unsure about it.

Best Answer

For formatting use dollar signs (double ones for equations that appear on their own line). One good trick is to just click edit on other peoples' posts and you will see their markup. The way you do chooses is "{10 \choose 2}" and you get (edit my post to see markup) $$ {10\choose 2}$$

(a) You're choosing 2 from the 10 defective ones and 4 from the 20 non-defectives (for a total of six) so it's ${10 \choose 2}{20 \choose 4}.$

(b) Right idea, but aside from the propagated mistake from (a) you forgot a term for 0 defective widgets.

(c) There's a way to do this one intuitively, but it's probably best to be careful. Let $D$ be the number of defective widgets. You want the conditional probability $P(D=3|D\ge 1)$ and a quick computation gives $$P(D=3|D\ge 1) = \frac{P(D = 3,D\ge 1)}{P(D\ge 1)} = \frac{P(D=3)}{P(D\ge 1)} =\frac{P(D=3)}{1-P(D=0)}$$ where the first step was just definition, the second used the fact that if $D=3,$ $D$ is automatically $\ge 1$ and the third used that the only way for the number of defective devices to not be $\ge 1$ is for there to be no defective devices. You can compute the two required probabilities the same way as in the first two parts.

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