Marginalization of conditional probabilities

41 Views Asked by At

An exam question asked to select all expressions that are equal to 1, given no independence assumptions. The solution stated that the following expression was not equal to 1, but I don't understand why. Is it possible this is a mistake?

$\sum_{a}\sum_{b}P(A=a | B=b)$

1

There are 1 best solutions below

0
On BEST ANSWER

For a fixed $b$, the sum is $1$ since you go over all possibilities of $A$. But then you also sum over all values of $b$, which means you sum over many $1$s.

For example, suppose you throw a dice. $A$ is the value of it, $B=1$ is it is even, $0$ if odd. Then this sum should be $2$, as given even, the sum of all options of $A$ is $1$ and given odd the sum of all options of $A$ is $1$.