An application of the law of total probability to a problem originally posed by Christiaan Huygens is to find the probability of “gambler’s ruin.” Suppose two players, often called Peter and Paul, initially have x and m − x dollars, respectively. A ball, which is red with probability p and black with probability q = 1 − p, is drawn from an urn. If a red ball is drawn, Paul must pay Peter one dollar, while Peter must pay Paul one dollar if the ball drawn is black. The ball is replaced, and the game continues until one of the players is ruined. It is quite difficult to determine the probability of Peter’s ruin by a direct analysis of all possible cases. But let Q(x) denote that probability as a function of Peter’s initial fortune x and observe that after one draw the structure of the rest of the game is exactly as it was before the first draw, except that Peter’s fortune is now either x + 1 or x − 1 according to the results of the first draw. The law of total probability with A = {red ball on first draw} and A^c = {black ball on first draw} shows that

This equation holds for x = 2, 3,…, m − 2. It also holds for x = 1 and m − 1 if one adds the boundary conditions Q(0) = 1 and Q(m) = 0, which say that if Peter has 0 dollars initially, his probability of ruin is 1, while if he has all m dollars, he is certain to win.

It can be verified by direct substitution that equation (5) together with the indicated boundary conditions are satisfied by

With some additional analysis it is possible to show that these give the only solutions and hence must be the desired probabilities.

Suppose m = 10x, so that Paul initially has nine times as much money as Peter. If p = 1/2, the probability of Peter’s ruin is 0.9 regardless of the values of x and m. If p = 0.51, so that each trial slightly favours Peter, the situation is quite different. For x = 1 and m = 10, the probability of Peter’s ruin is 0.88, only slightly less than before. However, for x = 100 and m = 1,000, Peter’s slight advantage on each trial becomes so important that the probability of his ultimate ruin is now less than 0.02.

Generalizations of the problem of gambler’s ruin play an important role in statistical sequential analysis, developed by the Hungarian-born American statistician Abraham Wald in response to the demand for more efficient methods of industrial quality control during World War II. They also enter into insurance risk theory, which is discussed in the section Stochastic processes: Insurance risk theory.

The following example shows that, even when it is given that A occurs, it is important in evaluating P(B|A) to recognize that A^c might have occurred, and hence in principle it must be possible also to evaluate P(B|A^c). By lot, two out of three prisoners—Sam, Jean, and Chris—are chosen to be executed. There arepossible pairs of prisoners to be selected for execution, of which two contain Sam, so the probability that Sam is slated for execution is 2/3. Sam asks the guard which of the others is to be executed. Since at least one must be, it appears that the guard would give Sam no information by answering. After hearing that Jean is to be executed, Sam reasons that, since either he or Chris must be the other one, the conditional probability that he will be executed is 1/2. Thus, it appears that the guard has given Sam some information about his own fate. However, the experiment is incompletely defined, because it is not specified how the guard chooses whether to answer “Jean” or “Chris” in case both of them are to be executed. If the guard answers “Jean” with probability p, the conditional probability of the event “Sam will be executed” given “the guard says Jean will be executed” is

Only in the case p = 1 is Sam’s reasoning correct. If p = 1/2, the guard in fact gives no information about Sam’s fate.

Independence

One of the most important concepts in probability theory is that of “independence.” The events A and B are said to be (stochastically) independent if P(B|A) = P(B), or equivalently if

The intuitive meaning of the definition in terms of conditional probabilities is that the probability of B is not changed by knowing that A has occurred. Equation (7) shows that the definition is symmetric in A and B.

It is intuitively clear that, in drawing two balls with replacement from an urn containing r red and b black balls, the event “red ball on the first draw” and the event “red ball on the second draw” are independent. (This statement presupposes that the balls are thoroughly mixed before each draw.) An analysis of the (r + b)² equally likely outcomes of the experiment shows that the formal definition is indeed satisfied.

In terms of the concept of independence, the experiment leading to the binomial distribution can be described as follows. On a single trial a particular event has probability p. An experiment consists of n independent repetitions of this trial. The probability that the particular event occurs exactly i times is given by equation (3).

Independence plays a central role in the law of large numbers, the central limit theorem, the Poisson distribution, and Brownian motion.

Bayes’s theorem

Consider now the defining relation for the conditional probability P(A_n|B), where the A_i are mutually exclusive and their union is the entire sample space. Substitution of P(A_n)P(B|A_n) in the numerator of equation (4) and substitution of the right-hand side of the law of total probability in the denominator yields a result known as Bayes’s theorem (after the 18th-century English clergyman Thomas Bayes) or the law of inverse probability:

As an example, suppose that two balls are drawn without replacement from an urn containing r red and b black balls. Let A be the event “red on the first draw” and B the event “red on the second draw.” From the obvious relations P(A) = r/(r + b) = 1 − P(A^c), P(B|A) = (r − 1)/(r + b − 1), P(B|A^c) = r/(r + b − 1), and Bayes’s theorem, it follows that the probability of a red ball on the first draw given that the second one is known to be red equals (r − 1)/(r + b − 1). A more interesting and important use of Bayes’s theorem appears below in the discussion of subjective probabilities.

Random variables

Usually it is more convenient to associate numerical values with the outcomes of an experiment than to work directly with a nonnumerical description such as “red ball on the first draw.” For example, an outcome of the experiment of drawing n balls with replacement from an urn containing black and red balls is an n-tuple that tells us whether a red or a black ball was drawn on each of the draws. This n-tuple is conveniently represented by an n-tuple of ones and zeros, where the appearance of a one in the kth position indicates that a red ball was drawn on the kth draw. A quantity of particular interest is the number of red balls drawn, which is just the sum of the entries in this numerical description of the experimental outcome. Mathematically a rule that associates with every element of a given set a unique real number is called a “(real-valued) function.” In the history of statistics and probability, real-valued functions defined on a sample space have traditionally been called “random variables.” Thus, if a sample space S has the generic element e, the outcome of an experiment, then a random variable is a real-valued function X = X(e). Customarily one omits the argument e in the notation for a random variable. For the experiment of drawing balls from an urn containing black and red balls, R, the number of red balls drawn, is a random variable. A particularly useful random variable is 1[A], the indicator variable of the event A, which equals 1 if A occurs and 0 otherwise. A “constant” is a trivial random variable that always takes the same value regardless of the outcome of the experiment.