Original practice · fully worked
Original variant: shifted incident dashboard count
The number of overnight incidents recorded by a monitoring service has a Poisson distribution with variance 3. Its dashboard adds one standing system check to the incident count. Calculate the probability that the displayed count is at most 2.
- A
0.0498 - B
0.1494 - C
0.1991 - D
0.4232 - E
0.8009
Answer and calculation
The Poisson variance gives a mean of 3. A display no greater than two permits at most one actual incident. Adding the zero- and one-incident probabilities gives 0.1991 and choice C.
Setup
Setup
Use the Poisson variance to identify its parameter.
N∼Poisson(3) Model
Model
Translate the dashboard threshold back to the underlying incident count.
D≤2⟺N+1≤2⟺N≤1 Compute
Compute
Add the two qualifying Poisson masses.
Pr(D≤2)=e−3+3e−3=4e−3 4e−3=0.1991482735 Answer
Answer
The dashboard is at most two with probability 0.1991.
0.1991(C)