Thread: independent or dependent event

1) State whether or not you feel the following pair of events is independent or dependent . the experiment is to study the achievements of young athletes. The first event is that the person is accepted on the national ski team, and the second event is that the person is drafted by a team in the national Hockey league.

My answer:
I believe it is independent because these 2 events are not affected by the occurrence of others.

Originally Posted by melissa4ever

1) State whether or not you feel the following pair of events is independent or dependent . the experiment is to study the achievements of young athletes. The first event is that the person is accepted on the national ski team, and the second event is that the person is drafted by a team in the national Hockey league.

My answer:
I believe it is independent because these 2 events are not affected by the occurrence of others.

Let S ad H denote the two events.

Independence means:

p(S and H) = p(S) p(H).

but there is some general athletic ability so the probability that someone
is accepted/selected for H given they have been accepted/selected for S
is greater than for a general person in the population so:

p(S and H) = p(S)p(H|S) > p(S) p(H).

So S and H are not independent

RonL