Solution

ID: past-exam-of-the-mathematics-course-of-the-year-1-of-the-natural-sciences-course-of-the-university-of-cambridge/2017/paper-1/16/c/i/solution

A probability density function must be nonnegative. The printed condition is therefore too weak: for the given prefactor makes the function negative everywhere. The location-scale form of the logistic distribution requires , which is assumed in the remaining parts.
Set , so . The normalization of a probability distribution follows from the antiderivative of the squared hyperbolic secant:
For completeness, the same expression with integrates to , since the transformed limits reverse. If a signed scale were desired, replacing its prefactor by would give a valid density, but that is a correction to the printed formula.

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