High Quality Content by WIKIPEDIA articles! In statistics, the hypergeometric distribution is the discrete probability distribution generated by picking colored balls at random from an urn without replacement. Various generalizations to this distribution exist for cases where the picking of colored balls is biased so that balls of one color are more likely to be picked than balls of another color. This can be illustrated by the following example. Assume that an opinion poll is conducted by calling random telephone numbers. Unemployed people are more likely to be home and answer the phone than employed people are. Therefore, unemployed respondents are likely to be over-represented in the sample. The probability distribution of employed versus unemployed respondents in a sample of n respondents can be described as a noncentral hypergeometric distribution.