What does the term "expected value" mean?

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Answer 1 · 2018-04-15T15:48:41

see below

For real life data the mean of the frequency distribution is calculated by the formula

$barx=(sumfx)/n$

for a probability distribution the expected value is the corresponding calculation; the theoretical mean if you like.

For discrete distributions

$mu=E(X)=sumxP(X=x)$

for continuous distribution

$mu=E(X)=int_(allx)xf(x)dx$

in both cases since the total probability is $1$ we do not need to divide by anything.