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I interpret the question along the lines of "if they do a hundred launches, what's your probability distribution on the number of them that fail?"

If I have a normal coin and a coin which is double-sided (but I don't know which side), I'll give 50% for both of them coming up heads next time I toss. But if I toss them a hundred times each, my probability distributions for them look totally different.

I suspect this information is encoded in your priors, but I don't know offhand how to access it.



So thinking about this some more: we're assuming engines have some "true failure rate" which we're trying to divine from evidence. 2% is currently the mean of your distribution on TFR, but the relevant question is what's the variance of your distribution?

Uniform prior, updated on the evidence that 1/36 engines have failed, I think this gives P(TFR = x) = x(1-x)^35 / (int x(1-x)^35 dx from 0 to 1). Apparently the integral is 1/1332, so P(TFR=x) = 1332·x·(1-x)^35. But that seems to have a mean of 5%, compared to your value of 2%, so I may have done something dumb?


2% is the estimate for the rate of rocket failure, not the estimate of the rate of engine failure.


Oh, right. Thanks.


Good question.

You can answer that question for each prior. The probability of, say, 3 failures is the sum over all priors of the probability that that prior is true, times the probability that it would leave you with 3 failures.

I leave writing a program to calculate this as an exercise to the reader. I've put enough time in on this one already, I have paying work to get back to.




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