How to Develop an Intuition for Probability With Worked Examples

Last Updated on November 1, 2019

Probability calculations are frustratingly unintuitive.

Our brains are too eager to take shortcuts and get the wrong answer, instead of thinking through a problem and calculating the probability correctly.

To make this issue obvious and aid in developing intuition, it can be useful to work through classical problems from applied probability. These problems, such as the birthday problem, boy or girl problem, and the Monty Hall problem trick us with the incorrect intuitive answer and require a careful application of the rules of marginal, conditional, and joint probability in order to arrive at the correct solution.

In this post, you will discover how to develop an intuition for probability by working through classical thought-provoking problems.

After reading this post, you will know:

  • How to solve the birthday problem by multiplying probabilities together.
  • How to solve the boy or girl problem using conditional probability.
  • How to solve the Monty Hall problem using joint probability.

Kick-start your project with my new book Probability for Machine Learning, including step-by-step tutorials and the Python source code files for all examples.

Let’s get started.

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