4 ms·
It's specifically not a Poisson process, which assumes that the chance of a bus arriving at any given time is constant. A bus arrival has some kind of multimod
by dmurray 3y ago
It's specifically not a Poisson process, which assumes that the chance of a bus arriving at any given time is constant.
A bus arrival has some kind of multimodal distribution, where the bus either comes on time or very late, with some noise in each case.
- kawhah 3y agoThe link between the Poisson process and the distribution of bus arrival times, is firstly that it's a good idealized example for understanding and reasoning about Poisson and exponential distribution, and secondly that the Poisson process somehow seems to be an accurate representation of our mental model of how waiting for a bus works. If buses are scheduled to come quite frequently (and don't disappear, so they do arrive with that frequency on average), but the variance in their arrival times is a lot bigger than the average gap between them, then the distribution is actually quite close to Poisson.