WINTER 2018/19 TERM 2 STAT 302: ASSIGNMENT 3

Due: 2pm on Thursday March 14, 2019

• Please remember to include a cover sheet when you submit your assignment. You may hand
in your assignment in class or deposit it in the STAT 302 assignment box on the ground floor of
the Earth Sciences Building (ESB) by the due time.

• When answering the questions, writing down the final answer will not be sufficient to receive full
marks. Please show all calculations unless otherwise specified. Also define any events and notation
that you use in your solutions.

1. We are studying the earthquake energy that the villages near the earthquake center can receive.
There are many villages located along the line with minimum -1 and maximum +2 kilometres away
from the earthquake center (see the picture below for illustration). Suppose we randomly pick
one village in that area. That is, if we let the location of the earthquake center be 0, the location
of the randomly picked village is uniformly distributed in the interval [−1, 2]. Also, suppose that
the earthquake energy that the picked village can receive is 1 plus 25% of its squared location.

Figure 1: Schematic diagram

(a) What is the cumulative distribution function of the earthquake energy that a randomly picked
village can receive?
(b) What is the probability density function of the earthquake energy that a randomly picked
village can receive?
(c) What is the expected amount of the earthquake energy that a randomly picked village can
receive?

2. You are designing a puzzle video game that requires fast reaction skills. Note that games such as
this can be used in medical settings as methods of psychological and mental assessment, and do
not only have uses for entertainment.

You are creating a game where players are supposed to do a simple task, but the simple task
changes when the background colour of the game changes, which happens unpredictably. There
are four possible background colours, where players are told that each one is associated with a
specific described task for them to complete. One round of the game consists of each background

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 colour appearing once in a random order (for example, red, green, blue, yellow). The length of
time that a background colour lasts before it changes has an Exponential distribution with pa-
rameter λ, but you have not decided on the value of λ yet. If Ti is the length of time that the ith
background colour lasts, then Ti ∼ Exp(λ).

(a) Recall that one ‘round’ of the game consists of all four background colours appearing once
each. First, define a new random variable for the length of time that a round lasts, and
express it in terms of the Ti random variables. Second, state the distribution of the new
random variable in terms of λ. Third, suggest a value for λ such that the expected length of
time for a single round would be 12 seconds.
(b) If this game was being used in a medical setting to assess mental attentiveness or reaction
time, then there might be worry that a single round of the game would be a poor assessment
of the desired trait in the patient. Collecting more information would be better, and it might
also be better to vary the order that the coloured backgrounds appear. You decide that the
game will have multiple rounds, and there will be one round for every single possible order
that the four colours can appear in (i.e., there will be one ‘red, green, blue, yellow’ round, one
‘green, red, yellow, blue’ round, etc.). In between each round, there will be 2 seconds of black
screen time to offer a moment for the patient to gather themselves. Calculate the expected
length of a whole game from start to finish, using your suggested λ from Part (a). Do not
include any black screen time before the first round or after the last round.

3. An astrophysics lab in UBC is doing research on a certain type of signals from the universe. A
signal detector has been built in BC for the purpose of detecting such signals. When a new signal
is detected, the detector records the strength of the signal and sends such data to the astrophysics
lab through satellite. To reduce the cost of sending these data, instead of sending the data as soon
as each individual signal arrives, the detector has been designed to wait until it has detected 10
signals before sending the data of these signals to the astrophysics lab. After sending the strengths
of the 10 detected signals, the detector waits for another 10 newly arrived signals and sends the
data to the lab in the next round. Suppose the strength of each signal has a Normal distribution
with mean 10 and standard deviation 2. Also, it is assumed that the strengths of signals are
independent of each other.

(a) Among the 10 signals sent in a randomly chosen round, what is the probability that exactly
3 of them will have strength larger than 12?
(b) Find the expected number of the signals (among the 10 signals) that have strength larger than
12.
(c) What are the mean and and variance of the total strength (sum of the strengths) of the
10 signals that the astrophysics lab receives each time?
(d) Identify the distribution of the total strength of the 10 signals that the astrophysics lab
receives each time.
(e) Based on your result from part (d), find the probability that the total strength of the 10
signals that the astrophysics lab will receive in the next round will be larger than 102.

4. Information theory studies the mathematical concepts involving transfer of information. Prob-
ability and statistics are at the core of the mathematics involved in information theory. Signal
processing, a subfield of information theory, is often concerned with the analysis of messages (such
as sound and images) and their distortion in the process of transfer.
In this problem, we consider a basic example of a probabilistic model that represents the distortion
of messages. Consider the communication of binary-valued messages over some transmission

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channel. More specifically, we assume any message transmitted between two specific locations
takes on one of two possible symbols: 0 or 1. Assume each symbol occurs with equal probability.
As it was previously mentioned, any value sent through the communication channel is subject to
distortion.
Assume the two possible symbols sent (and received) are 0 or 1. The communication system uses
a encoding/decoding scheme to transfer information. We consider two transmission devices that
have two parameters (α, β) that characterize the distortion of the messages. More specifically,
consider the following transmission machines:

1. If the first transmission device (T1 ) sends the binary value 0 to the receiver, the value of the
received message is a random variable X with distribution Beta(α = 1, β = 4); if the transmitter
sends the binary value 1 to the receiver, the value of the received message is a random variable
X with distribution Beta(α = 4, β = 1).
2. If the second transmission device (T2 ) sends the binary value 0 to the receiver, the value of
the received message is a random variable X with distribution Beta(α = 2, β = 6); if the
transmitter sends the binary value 1 to the receiver, the value of the received message is a
random variable X with distribution Beta(α = 6, β = 2).

Below are the relevant probability density functions for each transmitter.

Figure 2: Density function for each binary message received for both transmission devices.

Consider the following decoding scheme:

• The receiver follows the following rule to decode the message Y received from the transmission
channel:
– If X < 21 , the receiver concludes that the symbol 0 was sent.
– If X > 12 , the receiver concludes that the symbol 1 was sent.

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(a) Calculate the probability of a transmission error for this encoding/decoding scheme for both
transmission devices. Is one device better than the other? Assume throughout this problem
that the probability of sending a 0 or 1 is equal.
(b) In signal processing, statistical and probability theory is often used to figure out a clever
way to reduce the probability of a transmission error in transferring information through a
communication channel. Consider the following modification to our example: the symbol 0
is now encoded with the vector (of length N ) Tj = (0, . . . , 0); the symbol 1 is now encoded
with the vector (of length N ) Tj = (1, . . . , 1), for j = 1, 2. Each element of X is decoded in
the same way as previously explained. That is, X = (X1 , X2 , . . . , XN ) is the vector of the
decoded values where Xi ’s are independent and identically distributed Beta random variables.
However, now the entire message is decoded in the following way:
• If the majority (> 50%) of the elements of the vector X are less than 0, the message is
decoded as 0.
• If the majority (> 50%) of the elements of the vector X are greater or equal to 0, the
message is decoded as 1.
Note that only an odd number of the length of X, N , may be considered. Find a general
expression for the probability of a transmission error for this encoding/decoding scheme for
both transmission devices.
(c) What should be the minimum length N ∗ of the communication vectors in part (b) such that
the probability of a transmission error for this encoding/decoding scheme is less than 1%?
Compute the answers for both devices.
(d) To avoid sending multiple digits for a single binary message, a communication company has
developed a new transmission device with the following distortion:
• If the third transmission device (T3 ) sends the binary value 0 to the receiver, the value of
the received message is a random variable X with distribution Beta(α = 1, β = k); if the
transmitter sends the binary value 1 to the receiver, the value of the received message is
a random variable X with distribution Beta(α = k, β = 1). Assume the integer k > 4.
Find the probability of a transmission error as a function of k, and evaluate the probability
for k = 10. What happens to the shape of the beta distribution above as k increases?