I need help to check if my solution to an expected value of discrete random variable problem is correct.

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The problem statement says:

An urn contains balls numbered 1, 2, 3. First a ball is drawn from the urn, and then a fair coin is tossed the number of times as the number shown on the drawn ball. Fin the expected number of heads.

Now, what I have done so far is calculate the p.d.f for the problem as follows:

$H= $The drawn of head in all tosses of the coin

$P(X=1|H) = \frac{\text{# Of favorable cases}}{\text{# Of all cases}} = \frac{1}{3}*\frac{1}{2} = \frac{1}{6}$

$P(X=2|H) = \frac{1}{3}*\frac{1}{4} = \frac{1}{12}$

$P(X = 3 |H) = \frac{1}{3} * \frac{1}{8} = \frac{1}{24}$

Then I use the general formula for the Expected value in a discrete :

$\sum_{k = 1}^3{k*p(k)}=1*\frac{1}{6}+ 2*\frac{1}{12} + 3*\frac{1}{24} = \frac{1}{6} + \frac{1}{6} + \frac{1}{8} = \frac{11}{24}$

Now, this doesn't seem right to me, but I don't know why, I want to know what I'm doing wrong if I'm doing something wrong at all.

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First of all you have to calculate the probability to obtain once head for instance:

$N:=$ Ball with number N has been drawn, $H:=$ H is the number of heads

Law of total probabilty

$P(H=1)=P(H=1|N=1)\cdot P(N=1)+P(H=1|N=2)\cdot P(N=2)+P(H=1|N=3)\cdot P(N=3)$

$=\frac{1}{2}\cdot \frac{1}{3}+\frac{2}{4}\cdot \frac{1}{3}+\frac{3}{8}\cdot \frac{1}{3}$

It might be helpful to know that in general $P(H=k|N=n)=\binom{n}{k}\cdot 0.5^n$


You calculate $P(H=2)$ and $P(H=3)$ in the same way. Finally you calculate the expected value. This is indeed

$$E(H)=\sum_{k=1}^3 k\cdot P(H=k)$$