Paper 1 · Poisson Distribution
Under which conditions can the Poisson distribution be used as an approximation to the Binomial distribution?
Awhen is small and is close to 0.5
Bwhen is large and is small
Cwhen is large and is close to 1
Dwhen and are both large
Explanation: The Poisson approximation to the Binomial works well when the number of trials n is large and the probability of success p is small, so that the mean np remains a moderate, finite value; the Normal approximation is preferred instead when p is close to 0.5.
Derived from ZIMSEC Statistics Paper 1, November 2018, Q6
