Finding the expected number of a certain colored ball drawn from an urn in k draws

Question

Suppose we have an urn containing c yellow balls and d green balls. We draw k balls, without replacement, from the urn. Find the expected number of yellow balls drawn. Hint: Write the number of yellow balls drawn as the sum of c random variables.

I initially thought the solution is the sum of a hypergeometric distribution:

$$E(X) = \sum_{x = 0}^{k}x\frac{\binom{c}{x}\binom{d}{k-x}}{\binom{c+d}{k}}$$

The issue is that this doesn't work for any value of $k$ (for example, what if $k > c$ or $k-x > d$), it also doesn't fit with the hint given in the question. Is there a way to generate a more general solution for $1<k<c+d$?

Answer 1

All you need to do is replace $k$ with $min(k,c)$. So the expression would become :

$E(X) = \sum_{x = 0}^{min(k,c)}x\frac{\binom{c}{x}\binom{d}{k-x}}{\binom{c+d}{k}}$

Answer 2

The comment of saulspatz answers your question, and what I write here is actually not an answer.

I would like to attend you on a simpler way to find $\mathbb EX $ (too large for a comment ).

Give the yellow balls numbers $1,2,\dots,c $ and let rv $X_i$ take value $1$ if ball $i $ is chosen and value $0$ otherwise.

Then $X=X_1+\cdots +X_c $.

Now apply linearity of expectation being aware of the fact that the $X_i $ have identical distribution with mean $\frac {k}{c+d} $.

So you will end up with: $$\mathbb EX=\frac {kc}{c+d} $$

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I do not exclude that you already found this yourself on base of the hint.