Entering edit mode
13.5 years ago
Haibao Tang
3.0k
Recently I have a statistics question in mind - I know this is a bioinformatics QA site, so please bear with me.
Let's say we are repeatedly tossing a fair coin, and we know number of heads and tails should be roughly equal. When we see a result like 10 heads and 10 tails for a total of 20 tosses, we believe the results and are inclined to believe the coin is fair.
Well when you see a result like 10000 heads and 10000 tails for a total of 20000 tosses, I actually would question the validity of the result (did the experimenter fake the data), as I know this is more unlikely than, say a result of 10093 heads and 9907 tails.
What is the statistical argument behind my intuition?
