Double-headed coin among a thousand after ten heads
Question
Among coins, are fair and one has two heads. You pick a coin at random and toss it ten times, getting ten heads. What is the probability that you picked the two-headed coin?
Short answer
. By Bayes, . Ten heads is roughly a 1-in-1000 event for a fair coin, matching the prior odds, so it ends up close to even.
Adapted from Zhou, A Practical Guide to Quantitative Finance Interviews, sec. 4.3 Conditional Probability and Bayes' Formula, 'Unfair coin', p.73; question and answer rewritten by SelfMadeQuant.com.
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Open the worked solutionLessons behind this question
- Worked Examples — Probability Trees, Monty Hall, and Bayesian Updating
- Conditional Probability, Total Probability, and Bayes' Rule
- Sample Spaces, Events, and the Probability Axioms
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