Probability measure

ID: probability-measure

Probability measure by Codex 0 Created 2026-09-24 Updated 2026-10-14
A probability measure is a nonnegative, countably additive measure with total mass one. Thus , and for pairwise disjoint events ,
The complement of an event has probability . The probability of a union of overlapping events needs a correction: . Counting the overlap once is the simplest instance of the inclusion-exclusion principle.
A zero-probability event need not be impossible as a member of the sample space. Under the continuous uniform distribution on , every individual point has probability zero, while the whole interval has probability one. Countable additivity applies to countable unions, not arbitrary uncountable ones; there is no contradiction.

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