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Concept
Bernoulli trial
Summary
In the theory of probability and statistics, a Bernoulli trial (or binomial trial) is a random experiment with exactly two possible outcomes, "success" and "failure", in which the probability of success is the same every time the experiment is conducted. It is named after Jacob Bernoulli, a 17th-century Swiss mathematician, who analyzed them in his Ars Conjectandi (1713).
The mathematical formalisation of the Bernoulli trial is known as the Bernoulli process. This article offers an elementary introduction to the concept, whereas the article on the Bernoulli process offers a more advanced treatment.
Since a Bernoulli trial has only two possible outcomes, it can be framed as some "yes or no" question. For example:
Is the top card of a shuffled deck an ace?
Was the newborn child a girl? (See human sex ratio.)
Therefore, success and failure are merely labels for the two outcomes, and should not be construed literally. The term "success" in this sense consists in the result meeting specified conditions; it is not a value judgement. More generally, given any probability space, for any event (set of outcomes), one can define a Bernoulli trial, corresponding to whether the event occurred or not (event or complementary event). Examples of Bernoulli trials include:
Flipping a coin. In this context, obverse ("heads") conventionally denotes success and reverse ("tails") denotes failure. A fair coin has the probability of success 0.5 by definition. In this case, there are exactly two possible outcomes.
Rolling a , where a six is "success" and everything else a "failure". In this case, there are six possible outcomes, and the event is a six; the complementary event "not a six" corresponds to the other five possible outcomes.
In conducting a political opinion poll, choosing a voter at random to ascertain whether that voter will vote "yes" in an upcoming referendum.
Independent repeated trials of an experiment with exactly two possible outcomes are called Bernoulli trials. Call one of the outcomes "success" and the other outcome "failure".
Official source
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Related concepts (25)
Bernoulli process
In probability and statistics, a Bernoulli process (named after Jacob Bernoulli) is a finite or infinite sequence of binary random variables, so it is a discrete-time stochastic process that takes only two values, canonically 0 and 1. The component Bernoulli variables Xi are identically distributed and independent. Prosaically, a Bernoulli process is a repeated coin flipping, possibly with an unfair coin (but with consistent unfairness). Every variable Xi in the sequence is associated with a Bernoulli trial or experiment.
Bernoulli trial
In the theory of probability and statistics, a Bernoulli trial (or binomial trial) is a random experiment with exactly two possible outcomes, "success" and "failure", in which the probability of success is the same every time the experiment is conducted. It is named after Jacob Bernoulli, a 17th-century Swiss mathematician, who analyzed them in his Ars Conjectandi (1713). The mathematical formalisation of the Bernoulli trial is known as the Bernoulli process.
Bernoulli distribution
In probability theory and statistics, the Bernoulli distribution, named after Swiss mathematician Jacob Bernoulli, is the discrete probability distribution of a random variable which takes the value 1 with probability and the value 0 with probability . Less formally, it can be thought of as a model for the set of possible outcomes of any single experiment that asks a yes–no question. Such questions lead to outcomes that are boolean-valued: a single bit whose value is success/yes/true/one with probability p and failure/no/false/zero with probability q.
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