Question

A coffee shop owner wants to examine the number of customers who pass in front of his store in the morning from 7am to 8am. What would be an appropriate probability distribution?

binomial distribution

normal distribution

Poisson distribution

uniform distribution

Answer 1

Since, number of customers in a unit time is going to be discrete distribution with fixed rate of incoming customers in a unit time.

Hence, poisson distribution seems to be the most appropriate here.

Poisson distribution is a discrete probability distribution that expresses the probability of a given number of events occurring in a fixed interval of time and/or space if these events occur with a known average rate and independently of the time since the last event.

For binomial, you need a fixed number of trials which is not the case here...so not applicable here

For uniform distribution, we need to have a situation where  every outcome in a sample space is equally likely...hence not applicable here again

For normal distribution, data has to be continuous....As number of customers is discrete , hence normal distribution cannnot be used.

Answer....poisson distribution