I have detector which will detect an event with some probability p. If the detector says that an event occured, then that is always the case, so there are not false-positives. After I run it for some time, I get k events detected. I would like to calculate what the total number of events that occured was, detected or otherwise, with some confidence, say 95%.
So for example, let's say I get 13 events detected. I would like to be able to calculate that there were between 13 and 19 events with 95% confidence based on p.
Here's what I've tried so far:
The probability of detecting k events if there were n total is:
binomial(n, k) * p^k * (1 - p)^(n - k)
The sum of that over n from k to infinity is:
1/p
Which means, that the probability of there being n events total is:
f(n) = binomial(n, k) * p^(k + 1) * (1 - p)^(n - k)
So if I want to be 95% sure I should find the first partial sum f(k) + f(k+1) + f(k+2) ... + f(k+m)
which is at least 0.95 and the answer is [k, k+m]
. Is this the correct approach? Also is there a closed formula for the answer?
Best Answer
I would choose to use the negative binomial distribution, which returns the probability that there will be X failures before the k_th success, when the constant probability of a success is p.
Using an example
k=17 # number of successes p=.6 # constant probability of success
the mean and sd for the failures are given by
mean.X <- k*(1-p)/p sd.X <- sqrt(k*(1-p)/p^2)
The distribution of the failures X, will have approximately that shape
plot(dnbinom(0:(mean.X + 3 * sd.X),k,p),type='l')
So, the number of failures will be (with 95% confidence) approximately between
qnbinom(.025,k,p) [1] 4
and
qnbinom(.975,k,p) [1] 21
So you inerval would be [k+qnbinom(.025,k,p),k+qnbinom(.975,k,p)] (using the example's numbers [21,38] )
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