Fair Coin - Role in Statistical Teaching and Theory

Role in Statistical Teaching and Theory

The probabilistic and statistical properties of coin-tossing games are often used as examples in both introductory and advanced text books and these are mainly based in assuming that a coin is fair or "ideal". For example, Feller uses this basis to introduce both the idea of random walks and to develop tests for homogeneity within a sequence of observations by looking at the properties of the runs of identical values within a sequence. The latter leads on to a runs test. A time-series consisting of the result from tossing a fair coin is called a Bernoulli process.

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