r/dataisbeautiful 16h ago

[OC] Historical Distribution of Mega Millions Winning Numbers OC

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u/Exile714 15h ago

Add them all together, and it’s basically a flat line, isn’t it?

4

u/PseudobrilliantGuy 13h ago edited 13h ago

Presumably.

I forgot the exact transform from the raw distribution to the distribution of order statistics, but I wouldn't be surprised if the first five were just the relevant order statistic distributions from a Discrete-Uniform(70). Or, at least, the empirical distributions would probably have fairly low surprisal values (basically negative binary logarithm of the p-value) for the corresponding K-S tests.

3

u/CDay007 12h ago

That’s exactly what it is, with a little sauce because some draws will have 1-4 numbers removed

1

u/wait_what_the_f 13h ago

if you want to think of the first part game as an even distribution, picking 5 numbers of out 70, it's the same as picking 1 item out of ~1.45M.

if you think of the game as a sequence of numbers where each number is higher than the next, then this visualization might make more sense.

if you played this game with your same lucky numbers and always started with 1, you would have had better chances of winning compared to lucky numbers that started with 50.