In article <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>,
burt <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
>A casino that I frequent has a "bad beat" jackpot in its poker room.
>Without going into all the rules, suffice it to say that the chances of
>anyone's hitting the jackpot within any two minute interval is probably
>of the order 10**-6. In other words, hitting the jackpot can definitely
>be construed as a rare event. The jackpot had not been hit in about four
>months, until last weekend, when it was hit two times in 12 hours. This
>phenomena has happened before--several months without being hit, then
>bam, it is hit twice in a few hours. Isn't this a characteristic of a
>Poisson process? A very rare event goes a long time without occurring,
>then it occurs several times within a short period.
>Could one test the hypothesis of this "bad beat" jackpot following a
>Poisson distribution using a goodness-of-fit test??
This is not the characteristic of a Poisson process.
The times between events of a Poisson process are
independent exponential random variables; it is true
that the mode of the waiting times is zero, but
occurring "several times" quickly is not common.
--
This address is for information only. I do not claim that these views
are those of the Statistics Department or of Purdue University.
Herman Rubin, Dept. of Statistics, Purdue Univ., West Lafayette IN47907-1399
[EMAIL PROTECTED] Phone: (765)494-6054 FAX: (765)494-0558
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