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In statistics, the question of checking whether a coin is fair is one whose importance lies, firstly, in providing a simple problem on which to illustrate basic ideas of statistical inference and, secondly, in providing a simple problem that can be used to compare various competing methods of statistical inference, including decision theory.
Coin flipping, coin tossing, or heads or tails is the practice of throwing a coin in the air and checking which side is showing when it lands, in order to randomly choose between two alternatives. It is a form of sortition which inherently has two possible outcomes.
In probability theory and statistics, a sequence of independent Bernoulli trials with probability 1/2 of success on each trial is metaphorically called a fair coin. One for which the probability is not 1/2 is called a biased or unfair coin. In theoretical studies, the assumption that a coin is fair is often made by referring to an ideal coin.
For example, a fair coin toss is a Bernoulli trial. When a fair coin is flipped once, the theoretical probability that the outcome will be heads is equal to 1 ⁄ 2. Therefore, according to the law of large numbers, the proportion of heads in a "large" number of coin flips "should be" roughly 1 ⁄ 2.
Consider a simple statistical model of a coin flip: a single parameter that expresses the "fairness" of the coin. The parameter is the probability that a coin lands heads up ("H") when tossed. can take on any value within the range 0.0 to 1.0.
The entropy of the unknown result of the next toss of the coin is maximized if the coin is fair (that is, if heads and tails both have equal probability 1/2). This is the situation of maximum uncertainty as it is most difficult to predict the outcome of the next toss; the result of each toss of the coin delivers one full bit of information.
Feller's coin-tossing constants are a set of numerical constants which describe asymptotic probabilities that in n independent tosses of a fair coin, no run of k consecutive heads (or, equally, tails) appears. William Feller showed [1] that if this probability is written as p(n,k) then
Consider a coin-flipping experiment. We flip the coin and record whether it lands heads or tails. Let X = x 1, x 2, …, x 10 be 10 observations from the experiment. x i = 1 if the i th flip lands heads, and 0 otherwise. By invoking the assumption that the average of the coin flips is normally distributed, we can use the t-statistic to estimate ...