Shooting where success rate equals past hit fraction
Question
A basketball player takes shots. The first goes in and the second misses. From then on, the chance of making each shot equals the proportion of shots made so far. What is the probability that the player finishes with exactly made shots?
Short answer
. This is a Pólya urn: by induction, after shots the number made is uniform on . It holds for , and if made with probability for each , the next shot preserves uniformity on . So after shots each of to has probability .
Adapted from Zhou, A Practical Guide to Quantitative Finance Interviews, sec. 4.3 Conditional Probability and Bayes' Formula, 'Basketball scores', p.83; question and answer rewritten by SelfMadeQuant.com.
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Open the worked solutionLessons behind this question
- Conditional Probability, Total Probability, and Bayes' Rule
- Worked Examples — Probability Trees, Monty Hall, and Bayesian Updating
- Continuous Random Variables and Probability Density Functions
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