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In probability theory and statistics, a probability mass function (pmf) is a function that gives the probability that a discrete random variable is exactly equal to some value. The probability mass function is often the primary means of defining a discrete probability distribution, and such functions exist for either scalar or multivariate random variables whose domain is discrete.
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A probability mass function differs from a probability density function (pdf) in that the latter is associated with continuous rather than discrete random variables; the values of the latter are not probabilities as such: a pdf must be integrated over an interval to yield a probability.
Formal definition
Suppose that X: S → A (A
Thinking of probability as mass helps to avoid mistakes since the physical mass is conserved as is the total probability for all hypothetical outcomes x:
When there is a natural order among the hypotheses x, it may be convenient to assign numerical values to them (or n-tuples in case of a discrete multivariate random variable) and to consider also values not in the image of X. That is, fX may be defined for all real numbers and fX(x) = 0 for all x
Since the image of X is countable, the probability mass function fX(x) is zero for all but a countable number of values of x. The discontinuity of probability mass functions is related to the fact that the cumulative distribution function of a discrete random variable is also discontinuous. Where it is differentiable, the derivative is zero, just as the probability mass function is zero at all such points.
Measure theoretic formulation
A probability mass function of a discrete random variable X can be seen as a special case of two more general measure theoretic constructions: the distribution of X and the probability density function of X with respect to the counting measure. We make this more precise below.
Suppose that
Now suppose that
demonstrating that f is in fact a probability mass function.
Examples
Suppose that S is the sample space of all outcomes of a single toss of a fair coin, and X is the random variable defined on S assigning 0 to "tails" and 1 to "heads". Since the coin is fair, the probability mass function is
This is a special case of the binomial distribution, the Bernoulli distribution.
An example of a multivariate discrete distribution, and of its probability mass function, is provided by the multinomial distribution.