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In probability theory, an outcome is a possible result of an experiment or trial. [1] Each possible outcome of a particular experiment is unique, and different outcomes are mutually exclusive (only one outcome will occur on each trial of the experiment). All of the possible outcomes of an experiment form the elements of a sample space. [2]
An outcome is the result of a single execution of the model. Since individual outcomes might be of little practical use, more complicated events are used to characterize groups of outcomes. The collection of all such events is a sigma-algebra F {\displaystyle \scriptstyle {\mathcal {F}}} .
A simple example is the tossing of a fair (unbiased) coin. Since the coin is fair, the two outcomes ("heads" and "tails") are both equally probable; the probability of "heads" equals the probability of "tails"; and since no other outcomes are possible, the probability of either "heads" or "tails" is 1/2 (which could also be written as 0.5 or 50%).
In probability theory, an event is a subset of outcomes of an experiment (a subset of the sample space) to which a probability is assigned. [1] A single outcome may be an element of many different events, [2] and different events in an experiment are usually not equally likely, since they may include very different groups of outcomes. [3]
As discussed above, there are several context-dependent ways of defining the expected value. The simplest and original definition deals with the case of finitely many possible outcomes, such as in the flip of a coin. With the theory of infinite series, this can be extended to the case of countably many possible outcomes.
Probability theory or probability calculus is the branch of mathematics concerned with probability.Although there are several different probability interpretations, probability theory treats the concept in a rigorous mathematical manner by expressing it through a set of axioms.
A discrete probability distribution is applicable to the scenarios where the set of possible outcomes is discrete (e.g. a coin toss, a roll of a die) and the probabilities are encoded by a discrete list of the probabilities of the outcomes; in this case the discrete probability distribution is known as probability mass function.
Here, an "event" is a set of zero or more outcomes; that is, a subset of the sample space. An event is considered to have "happened" during an experiment when the outcome of the latter is an element of the event. Since the same outcome may be a member of many events, it is possible for many events to have happened given a single outcome.