Tuesday, November 20, 2007
Consider this
problem. You are running a high school and you suspect some gang
activities, so you want to be on the lookout for people wearing gang
`uniforms'. But you don't know what any of the uniforms might be.
So you watch the students and take note of what they are wearing:
some have puffy jackets, some have hoodies, some have t-shirts,
some have baggy pants, some have hats that they wear backwards,
etc. etc. etc. Over the course of the day, you see a lot of different
clothing, a lot of different combinations, and all in different colors.
You note, however, that you did see five students wearing purple
puffy jackets, baggy pants, and red baseball caps. What is the
liklihood that this is a gang uniform?
Obviously, it will depend on the size of the student population and
the prevalence of certain kinds of clothing, but in the extreme case
where you see, say, fifteen students with the *exact* same outfits
that match in twenty-seven different random qualities, you can be
pretty sure that is a gang. On the other hand, if you see two students
that happen to wear the same color puffy jacket and otherwise have
nothing in common, you can write that one off as coincidence.
So given the number of students and the relative prevalence of various
clothing elements, how many points of coincidence do you need to
be fairly certain you have found a gang uniform?
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2 comments:
Isn't time an important factor here? Wouldn't you want to track if you see the same individuals wearing similar uniforms over a couple of days?
Good point. For this problem, we can assume that no one ever changes his clothes.
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