easy   Probability

Head-Tail Product

A release-checked easy problem for training Discrete Random Variables, Expected Value.

Question

Billy flips a fair coin $n$ times. Let $X$ denote the number of heads, and let $Y$ denote the number of tails. $\mathbb{E}[XY]$ can be expressed in the form \[\begin{aligned} \frac{an^2 + bn + c}{d} \end{aligned}\] for some integers $a, b, c, d$, where $a, b, c$ are each relatively prime with $d$. Compute $a + b + c + d$.

Practice focus

This Probability problem is tagged Discrete Random Variables, Expected Value. State the random variables and conditioning information explicitly, then check the result against boundary cases before opening hints or a solution.

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