For the binomial experiment, you need to have four things.
- A fixed number of trials.
- The number of trials need to be independent
- The probability of success on every trial needs to be the same.
- Each trial there can only be two outcomes – typically successes and failures.
Use: Let’s say that you want to know the probability of guessing correctly on seven (7) test questions on a Villanova University Six Sigma test without knowing the material. Each of the 10 test questions has four choices – A through D. For this, you will use a binomial experiment. The fixed number of trials is 10.
Each of the trials is independent meaning that each of the test questions is independent (or not dependent) of each other. The probability of success is 0.25 on each of the 10 questions. And each test question can either be correct or incorrect meaning that there are only two outcomes. This meets the criteria for a binomial experiment.
