Probability In Our daily life!
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These are some feelings almost everyone experienced. During the rainy season if you go out without an umbrella it will be raining heavily even when on that day when you went out of your house the sky was not at all cloudy, and vice versa. I had to catch a train every Saturday evening for coming back to my home from a distant suburban town and that particular train used to come late regularly. Surprisingly, the day I reached the station late, found that I had missed the train due to coming late! Before a particular surgery was performed on one of my close relatives since the doctor told us that the chances of survival after the surgery is 90% we conveyed our consent to the surgeon to make necessary arrangements for the operation. Unfortunately, the patient could not survive the operation. After the shock, we realized that we were actually told about a 10% chance of failure but never paid attention to that “one in ten” possibility. Now we are skeptical about the competency of the surgeon. Actually, what went wrong in the above three cases is, the happenings are going against our expectations.
Let me tell you next, there are other reasons which were equally responsible for our wrong assumption and dissatisfaction with the actual happenings! This is because here we didn’t have enough data to draw inferences correctly. Why so? Come to a practical event. When we flip a coin probability of both outcomes is equal, i.e. 50-50 chance to get a ‘Head’ or a ‘Tail’. You can do it yourself for say 10 times. There is a rare chance you end the game with 5 Heads and 5 Tails. If you go on tossing the coin 100 times you’ll find the percentage of Heads(H) now much closer to the 50% mark than before. Next, when you go on flipping the same coin 1000 times, you will find that percentage is now more or less around 50.
Uncertainty and probability:
Our real life seems to be chaotic and uncertain. We have witnessed so many incidents that happened in our life for which we were never prepared before they happened. We don’t know what’s going to happen to us in the next moment. So, we need to use probability theory. We seek our answer by using Mathematics and/or Statistics based on our past experience ( in the form of statistical data ) and we can predict what will happen in the future. This process is helpful in decision-making also. Let us see how!
- Weather Forecast: This is the most common example for use of probability in real life. We should always check the weather forecast of a place where we plan to visit. Sometimes the forecaster says that there is a 70% chance of rain there on the day we are planning to be there. So, we defer our tour programmed earlier to have fair weather to enjoy the venue. One may question: “How they could declare the percentage (70% in this case) of probability to rain there on that particular day?” The answer is: Meteorological department uses sophisticated equipment and algorithms to understand the probability. They use historical data, with more emphasize on the current trend,s and then declare the chance of rain on a particular date. A similar technique can be applied to forecast temperature, and the possibility of snowfall or thunderstorms as well.
2. Probability Applied in Sports:
Many matches start with a toss or flipping of a coin to decide about some basic things, to begin with. Though the chances of Head or Tell are exactly equal (50-50), here captains of both teams have to depend on their luck to win the toss. But subsequent to the toss in a cricket match, the captain of the winning team will have to decide which team will bat first depending on the probability of winning by batting first ( or otherwise bowling first ) on that particular pitch. Next, the captain and /or coach of the team arrange the batting order of all batters playing in the team based on the probability of the batter to get success in scoring high in a particular batting order.
3. Card Games and Chess:
card games like Rummy use probability and sometimes permutation-combination also to guess the kind of cards that will be up on the table at a later stage. Poker requires probability and statistics to estimate the chances of getting a good hand or a bad hand. Players use probability to predict whether they will bet more or fold their hands at some point in the game. In the game of chess, it is very important to predict the future move of the opponent you are playing with.
4. Insurance: In insurance, sector probability has a big role to play. Just think about how your life insurance premium directly varies with your age. It is simply because the probability of death increases with age. I remember one life insurance agent’s statement for selling an insurance plan to me: “ We always pray for your long life!” Needless to mention this is a fact as the insurance company has to pay out claims in case of death of a life-insured person we can easily understand they will professionally pray for their long life! Smokers are likely to pay more premiums for their health insurance as compared with non-smokers of the same age as the risk of certain diseases is expected to increase for smokers. Similarly, insurance companies lower the premium in group insurance policies based on previous data available with the number of claims they had to settle in previous years.
5. Medical Diagnosis & Treatment: How do doctors decide whether the cough of a patient is due to a simple infection or it is something more serious? Doctors have to understand false positives and false negatives when they diagnose their patients and use many mathematical techniques so that they can treat their patients efficiently. During the Covid-19 endemic, it was observed that probability theory and mathematical simulation were frequently used in making predictions about the spreading of the virus or guessing the exact period after which the next wave of infection would probably hit a place. Since, in the beginning, Medical Science was not at all aware of the nature of Coronaviruses this method have been found immensely helpful for our health service sector to plan for the availability of oxygen cylinders, more hospital beds, and such other necessary precaution to combat the disease.
6. Politics: Politicians and campaign managers use statistics and probability to target specific voter demographics and predict election results. A political firm is interested in estimating what percentage of citizens will support a particular party or some important socio-political issues. A sample space with a few randomly selected individuals is created for the study and if the responses received are 70% of them are in favor ( 30% opposing ) of the issue then they guess that the winning chance is 70% for that political party.
Let me tell you that since there are many other fields where probability is applied in our daily life, the list finally becomes endless. If anyone is interested to learn more about the application of probability, information is always available.
