Probability that a book with $200$ pages has $3$ misprints at most using Poisson approximation

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A publisher assumes that when printing a typical book, the probability for a misprint on a page is $1.25$%.

I'm trying to find out these two things:

  • What is the probability that on a book with $200$ pages three misprints are made at most?
  • How can one calculate the above using the Poisson limit theorem?

I think the probability that each misprint appears on a given page is $p = \frac{1}{n}$.

Exactly three would be $\binom{m}{3}p^3(1-p)^{m-3}$.

$$\binom{200}{3}(\frac{1}{200})^3 (1-\frac{1}{200})^{200-3} = 0.0612 = 6,12 \text{%}$$

Is that correct?

I know that the poisson limit theorem is defined like this:

$$\lim_{n \to \infty} \binom{n}{k}p^k_n(1-p_n)^{n-k} = e^{-\lambda} \frac{\lambda^k}{k!}$$ where $p_n$ is a sequence of real numbers in $[0,1]$ so that the sequence $np_n$ converges to a finite limit $\lambda$.

I tried

$$P(X \leq 3) = \frac{e^{-1}1^0}{0!} + \frac{e^{-1}1^1}{1!} + \frac{e^{-1}1^2}{2!} + \frac{e^{-1}1^3}{3!}$$

but this doesn't give the answer as above.

Any help is appreciated!

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This might be a useful approach to consider, based on my reading of the information:

The probability of a page containing a misprint is given as 1.25%. I interpret this to imply $p=0.0125$.

To determing the probability of having exactly 3 misprinted pages out of 200, using the binomial distribution, one then has:

$$ P(k=3)=\binom{200}{3} p^{3}(1-p)^{\left(200-3\right)} $$

$$ \binom{200}{3} = \frac{200!}{3!(200-3)!} = \frac{200 \times 199 \times 198}{6}=1313400 $$

$$ P(k=3)=\binom{200}{3} p^{3}(1-p)^{\left(200-3\right)} = 1313400 \times 0.0125^{3} \times (1-0.0125)^{197} = 0.215246 $$

Comparing to the Poisson distribution,

$$ P(k=3)=\frac{\lambda^{k}e^{-\lambda}}{k!} $$

let $\lambda=pn= 0.0125 \times 200=2.5$, we have

$$ P(k=3)=\frac{2.5^{3}e^{-2.5}}{6}=0.2137630 $$

To compute the "at most 3", I believe it requires adding the contributions of $k=0,k=1,k=2$ to the one for $k=3$.

I hope this helps.