I’m looking for some tips on working out conditional probability word problems. I would love some tips or advice on how to put these together. For instance,
A company uses two other companies NE and DP to ship out products. Records indicate that shipments with NE are late with probability .1.
I can’t figure out if this should be p(late|NE) or the other way around. Any tips on working this out would be greatly appreciated.
Conditional probabilities can be translated as P(B|A) = "The probability of B, assuming A" = "If A is true, then the probability of B occurring is ..." - notice that if we ignore the conditional part, it's still P(B) = the probability of B.
So, in this case, "If the shipment comes from NE, then the probability the shipment will be late is 0.1" means we're still measuring the probability of the event "the shipment is late", so it's P(late), but we're looking at the situation of shipping from NE, so it's P(late|NE).