8 - Fundamentals of Probability

Question 1

What is Intrinsically random behavior?

Answer 1

Making decisions under uncertainty

Question 2

What is Utility theory?

Answer 2

It is used to represent and infer preferences

Utility theory rests upon the idea that people behave as if they make decisions by assigning imaginary utility values to the original monetary values

Question 3

What are Random Variables?

Answer 3

something that assigns numerical outcomes to the outcomes of some experiment or process that we treat as randoma variable whose possible values are numerical outcomes of a random phenomenon

something that assigns numerical outcomes to the outcomes of some experiment or process that we treat as random

A random variable is a function. It is not a variable, and it is not random!

Question 4

What is an Atomic event?

Answer 4

a complete specification of the state of the world, or a complete assignment of domain values to all random variables * Atomic events are mutually exclusive and exhaustive

Question 5

What are Joint probability distributions?

Answer 5

A joint distribution is an assignment of probabilities to every possible atomic event - a probability distribution for two or more random variables

Question 6

What are Marginal probability distributions?

Answer 6

Marginal Probability refers to the probability of a single event occurring, without considering any other events

Question 7

What is Conditional probability?

Answer 7

measures the likelihood of an event occurring when another event has already taken place

Question 8

What is Probabilistic inference?

Answer 8

the process of inferring unknown properties of a system given observations via the mechanics of probability theory