Site icon R-bloggers

three birthdays and a numeral

xi'an

[This article was first published on R – Xi'an's Og, and kindly contributed to R-bloggers]. (You can report issue about the content on this page here)
Want to share your content on R-bloggers? click here if you have a blog, or here if you don't.

The riddle of the week on The Riddler was to find the size n of an audience for at least a 50% chance of observing at least one triplet of people sharing a birthday, as is the case in the present U.S. Senate. The question is much harder to solve than for a pair of people but the formula exists!, as detailed on this blog entry, this X validated entry, or my friend Anirban Das Gupta’s review of birthday problems. If W is the number of triplets among n people,

which returns n=88 as the smallest population size for which P(W=0|n=88)=0.4889349, while P(W=0|n=87)=0.5005451. A simulation based on 10⁶ draws confirms this boundary value, P(W=0|n=88)≈0.4890849 and P(W=0|n=87)≈0.5006471.

To leave a comment for the author, please follow the link and comment on their blog: R – Xi'an's Og.
R-bloggers.com offers daily e-mail updates about R news and tutorials about learning R and many other topics. Click here if you're looking to post or find an R/data-science job.
Want to share your content on R-bloggers? click here if you have a blog, or here if you don't.