Notes:Poisson and Gamma distribution
From Maths
- These are PRELIMINARY NOTES: I got somewhere and don't want to lose the work on paper.
Contents
[hide]Initial notes
Here we will use X∼Poi(λ) for λ∈R>0 as "events per unit time" for simplicity of conceptualising what's going on, in practice it wont matter what continuous unit is used.
We use the following:
- Let k∈N≥1, we are interested in the distribution of the time until k events have accumulated.
- Let T be the time until k accumulations, so:
- F(t):=P[T≤t]=1−P[T>t][Note 1] and we can use P[T>t] to be "fewer events than k occurred for the range of time [0,t]" or to be more formal / specific:
- P[T>t]=P[the number of events that occurred for the range of time [0,t]<k]
- =P[the number of events that occurred for the range of time [0,t]≤k−1]
- P[T>t]=P[the number of events that occurred for the range of time [0,t]<k]
- F(t):=P[T≤t]=1−P[T>t][Note 1] and we can use P[T>t] to be "fewer events than k occurred for the range of time [0,t]" or to be more formal / specific:
Lastly,
- If λ is the rate of events per unit time, then for t units of time tλ is the rate of events per t-units of time, so we define:
- Xt∼Poi(tλ)
- And we observe:
- P[the number of events that occurred for the range of time [0,t]≤k−1]
- =P[Xt≤k−1]
- P[the number of events that occurred for the range of time [0,t]≤k−1]
We have now discovered:
- F(t)=P[T≤t]=1−P[Xt≤k−1], for k∈N≥1 remember
Evaluation
We now compute P[T≤t]
- Let's start with P[T≤t]=1−P[Xt≤k−1]
- =1−(k−1∑i=0P[Xt=i]) - notice the sum starts at i=0, as k≥1 we must at least have one term, the (i=0)th one.
- =1−(k−1∑i=0e−tλ(tλ)ii!)