The average number of railway accidents occurring along the North-South (NS) line in any one month is . Accidents occur independently of one another and the probability of a railway accident occurring due to technical fault is given by . The probability that there is at least one railway accident occurring along the NS line in any one week is known to be 0.25. A week is taken as a fourth part of a month.
- (i)
Find the exact value of .
- (ii)
Find the probability that, in any one week, there are two railway accidents occurring along the NS line with exactly one of them due to technical fault. Give your answer in terms of .
- (iii)
The average number of railway accidents occurring along the East-West (EW) line in a month is 2. Accidents occurring along the NS line are independent of accidents occurring along the EW line.
Find the probability that, in any one week, no railway accidents occur along the EW line given that a total of 3 railway accidents occur along the two lines.
- (iv)
Find, using a suitable approximation, the probability that in 5 years, there are more than 52 months with at most 4 railway accidents occurring along the EW line.
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Worked solution
13(i)
1. Define the distribution for the number of accidents in a week.
Let be the number of railway accidents on the NS line in one week.
Since a week is a fourth part of a month, the average number of accidents in a week is .
Given that accidents occur independently at a constant average rate, .
2. Formulate an equation using the given probability of at least one accident.
We are given that .
Using the complement rule:
3. Solve for the exact value of $m$.
Take the natural logarithm on both sides:
13(ii)
1. Find the average number of accidents in a week ($\lambda$) from the context of part (i).
Let be the number of railway accidents along the NS line in a week. Assuming accidents occur randomly and independently, follows a Poisson distribution, .
Given :
2. Calculate the probability that exactly 2 accidents occur along the NS line in a week.
3. Determine the conditional probability that exactly one of the two accidents is due to a technical fault.
Given that 2 accidents occurred, the number of accidents due to technical faults follows a Binomial distribution .
The probability that exactly one of the 2 accidents is due to a technical fault is:
4. Multiply the probabilities to find the overall required probability.
13(iii)
1. Define the distribution of accidents for both lines in one week.
Let be the number of accidents on the NS line and be the number of accidents on the EW line in a week.
From part (i), the weekly average for the NS line is .
For the EW line, the average per month is , so the average per week is .
Assuming the accidents follow a Poisson distribution based on the constant average rate and independence, and .
2. Set up the conditional probability expression.
We need to find .
Using the formula for conditional probability:
Since and implies :
Because accidents along the NS and EW lines are independent:
3. Calculate the required probability using the sum of independent Poisson distributions.
Since and are independent, , where .
Calculating the numerator:
Calculating the denominator:
Therefore,
(Note: This simplifies algebraically to .)
Rounding to 3 significant figures, the probability is .
0.0487
13(iv)
1. Find the probability of at most 4 accidents occurring along the EW line in a single month.
Let be the number of railway accidents on the EW line in a month.
Since the average is 2, .
2. Define the binomial random variable for the 5-year period.
In 5 years, there are months.
Let be the number of months with at most 4 accidents.
We need to find .
3. Determine and state the suitable approximation.
We test the parameters for the approximation:
Since is large and , the Normal approximation is not suitable. Instead, we use the Poisson approximation for the number of months with more than 4 accidents.
Let be the number of months with more than 4 accidents.
The suitable approximation is where .
4. Calculate the final approximated probability.
Using :
(to 3 s.f.)
0.984
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