Hi. How do you determine an instance of a Poisson Distribution? Given: A car passes through a deserted intersection on average every five minutes. average = 5 minutes Question: What is an estimate (instance) of the number of cars that passed through this intersection in a period of four week? I understand how to do the time conversion, but I do not understand how to get the Poisson instance when given the condition such as the one above. Thanks, Kuphryn

int poisson(double lambda){
int value=0;
for(double r=instance_of_uniform_distribution(0,1);r>0;++value)
r-=poisson_probability(lambda, value);
return value;
}

Okay. Thanks.

Can you explain your solution?

What function is instance_of_uniform_distribution()? Is that from C/C++ library? How about poisson_probability()?

Lastly, what does function poisson() return? If possible, please give an example with input data.

Kuphryn

instance_of_uniform_distribution() and poisson_probability() are placeholders. You should provide those functions. Something like

Nice!!!

Given: average = 5 minutes.
Time: t = 0

I assume poisson will return the time based on previous time.

t0 = 0
t1 = poisson(t0)
t2 = t1 + poisson(t1)
...

Correct? In other words, lamba is based on t-1.

Kuphryn

Err... No.

The Poisson distribution gives you the number of cars in a given period of time. For instance, if a car passes on average every five minutes and you want to generate an instance of how many cars passed in four weeks, you should call poisson(4weeks/5minutes).

If you want to generate an instance of how long you have to wait for the next car to pass, you should use the exponential distribution.

Okay. Thanks.

Kuphryn