Bernoulli Trials and the Binomial Distribution

Bernoulli Trials and the Binomial Distribution is a part of the VCE Maths Methods topic Probability and Statistics and subtopic Binomial Distribution.

Let’s start by understanding the Bernoulli distribution.

The Bernoulli distribution is a discrete distribution, which means it’s outcomes have only one of two values: 0 or 1. Typically 1 is the success, and 0 is the failure.

If p is the probability of success:

• The expectation of the distribution is p
• The variance is p(1-p)

The Bernoulli Distribution

The following video introduces the Bernoulli distribution.

Now we know a little bit about the distribution, let’s use a Bernoulli random variable as a model for two-outcome situations.

Here we will also understand the concepts of Bernoulli trials and the concept of a binomial random variable as the number of ‘successes’ in independent Bernoulli trials, with the same probability of success in each trial. 

Frequency from the Bernoulli distribution

Let’s learn to calculate the expected frequencies of the various possible outcomes from a series of Bernoulli trials.

The Binomial Distribution

The following two videos will introduce the binomial probability distribution and how to find unknown parameters.

Part 1

Part 2

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