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Probability mass function |
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Cumulative distribution function |
| Notation |
 |
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| Parameters |
n ∈ N0 — number of trials
(real)
(real) |
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| Support |
x ∈ { 0, …, n } |
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| PMF |
where is the beta function |
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| CDF |
where 3F2(a;b;x) is the generalized hypergeometric function  |
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| Mean |
 |
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| Variance |
 |
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| Skewness |
 |
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| Excess kurtosis |
See text |
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| MGF |
where is the hypergeometric function |
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| CF |
 |
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| PGF |
 |
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In probability theory and statistics, the beta-binomial distribution is a family of discrete probability distributions on a finite support of non-negative integers arising when the probability of success in each of a fixed or known number of Bernoulli trials is either unknown or random. The beta-binomial distribution is the binomial distribution in which the probability of success at each of n trials is not fixed but randomly drawn from a beta distribution. It is frequently used in Bayesian statistics, empirical Bayes methods and classical statistics to capture overdispersion in binomial type distributed data.
The beta-binomial is a one-dimensional version of the Dirichlet-multinomial distribution as the binomial and beta distributions are univariate versions of the multinomial and Dirichlet distributions respectively. The special case where α and β are integers is also known as the negative hypergeometric distribution.