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What does the expected value for this problem mean, in layman's terms?
So there problem states:
Suppose that a school has 20 classes:
16 with 25 students in each
3 with 100 students in each
1 with 300 students, for a total of 1000 students.
a)
What is the average class size?
b)
Select a student randomly out of the 1000 students. Let the random variable X equal the size of the class to which this student belongs, and define the p.m.f. of X.
c)
Find E (X), the expected value of X.
So for a), the average class size is 50 because there's 1000 students/20 classes, or it can be viewed as a weighted average: [16(25)+3(100)+1(300)]/1000. So this makes sense to me because if you were to take a student at random, they would belong to a class of 50 students on average.
For b), if X is the size of the class to which a student belongs, then X = is the set of random variables, which are the class sizes: {25, 100, 300}. So the p.m.f. is the probability of someone being in a class of 25, 100, and 300, respectively. There are 25*16 = 400, 100*3 = 300, and 300*1 = 300 students in each of the class sizes, so out of 1000 students, the respective probabilities are 0.4, 0.3, and 0.3, when x (the class size ) = 25, 100, and 300, respectively.
So f(x) = {0.4, 0.3, 0.3} for x = {25,100,300}
Thus, for c) the expected value E[X] = x1(f(x1))+...x3(f(x3)) = 25*0.4+100*0.3+300*0.3 = 130.
So this is saying that the expected outcome of choosing a student out of 1000 is that they belong to a class size of 130, right?
Clearly, 50 and 130 are not equivalent. So if 50 is the average class size, then wouldn't each student, on average, belong to a class of 50 students? Or is this saying that each class category, on average, has 130 students?
This is the part that isn't clear to me. Is there a very simple way of explaining this?
But aren't the extreme class sizes counter-weighted by the number of those extreme class sizes. So for example, there's only one class with 300 students.
What kind of "mean" would E[X] be?
BeeFree,
So if we said that, on average, there are 50 students per class.
Then, on average, there are 130 students per what? Class size?
1 Answer
- 8 years agoFavorite Answer
The average class size is definitely 50 since 1000 students evenly distributed in 20 classes would give a class size of 50.
The expected is basically what the average outcome in all possible variations. It is not equal to 50 because it is affected by extreme class sizes (25, 300) since there is a higher probability of getting a student that belongs to a class of 300. Take note that when getting the expected value, you multiply the random variable with its function value.