Question

I teach 80 students. The probability that a student will attend the class is p = 0.85. What is the probability that on a given date I have at least 60 students in class? (Please provide a STATA code, and STATA table, and justify your answer!)

Answer 1

The question is about calculating the probability of at least 60 out of 80 students attending a class, using a binomial distribution function in STATA. The required STATA command is 'display 1 - binomialp(80, 0.85, 59)', which will output the probability after executing it.

Step-by-step explanation:

The question relates to the probability of at least 60 students attending a class when each of the 80 students has an independent probability of 0.85 to attend. This is a binomial probability problem because each student either attends or doesn't, with a fixed probability of attendance. However, calculating the probability of at least 60 students attending directly is complex, but modern statistical software like STATA can calculate it efficiently using a binomial distribution function.

To find this probability in STATA, you would use the binomial cumulative distribution function. The command in STATA would look something like this:

display 1 - binomialp(80, 0.85, 59)

This command calculates the probability of having 59 or fewer students, which is subtracted from 1 to get the probability of having at least 60 students. The STATA output will provide the required probability value, which represents the likelihood that at least 60 students will attend the class on a given date, given the attendance probability of 0.85 for each student.