Beta-binomial distribution

Probability mass function
Cumulative distribution function
Notation
Parameters nN0 — number of trials
(real)
(real)
Support x ∈ {0, …, n}
PMF

where is the beta function
CDF

where 3F2(a;b;x) is the generalized hypergeometric function
Mean
Variance
Skewness
Excess kurtosis See text
MGF where is the hypergeometric function
CF
PGF

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.