Urn problem

Two urns containing white and red balls.

In probability and statistics, an urn problem is an idealized mental exercise in which some objects of real interest (such as atoms, people, cars, etc.) are represented as colored balls in an urn or other container. One pretends to remove one or more balls from the urn; the goal is to determine the probability of drawing one color or another, or some other properties. A number of important variations are described below.

An urn model is either a set of probabilities that describe events within an urn problem, or it is a probability distribution, or a family of such distributions, of random variables associated with urn problems.[1]

  1. ^ Dodge, Yadolah (2003) Oxford Dictionary of Statistical Terms, OUP. ISBN 0-19-850994-4