Concept
Law of total probability
Related concepts (4)
Conditional expectation
In probability theory, the conditional expectation, conditional expected value, or conditional mean of a random variable is its expected value – the value it would take "on average" over an arbitrarily large number of occurrences – given that a certain set of "conditions" is known to occur. If the random variable can take on only a finite number of values, the "conditions" are that the variable can only take on a subset of those values.
Conditional probability
In probability theory, conditional probability is a measure of the probability of an event occurring, given that another event (by assumption, presumption, assertion or evidence) has already occurred. This particular method relies on event B occurring with some sort of relationship with another event A. In this event, the event B can be analyzed by a conditional probability with respect to A. If the event of interest is A and the event B is known or assumed to have occurred, "the conditional probability of A given B", or "the probability of A under the condition B", is usually written as P(AB) or occasionally P_B(A).
Law of total variance
In probability theory, the law of total variance or variance decomposition formula or conditional variance formulas or law of iterated variances also known as Eve's law, states that if and are random variables on the same probability space, and the variance of is finite, then In language perhaps better known to statisticians than to probability theorists, the two terms are the "unexplained" and the "explained" components of the variance respectively (cf. fraction of variance unexplained, explained variation).
Independence (probability theory)
Independence is a fundamental notion in probability theory, as in statistics and the theory of stochastic processes. Two events are independent, statistically independent, or stochastically independent if, informally speaking, the occurrence of one does not affect the probability of occurrence of the other or, equivalently, does not affect the odds. Similarly, two random variables are independent if the realization of one does not affect the probability distribution of the other.