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# Explain inclusion-exclusion principle with example.

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In combinatorics (combinatorial mathematics), the inclusion–exclusion principle is a counting technique which generalizes the familiar method of obtaining the number of elements in the union of two finite sets; symbolically expressed as
{\displaystyle |A\cup B|=|A|+|B|-|A\cap B|,}
where A and B are two finite sets and |S| indicates the cardinality of a set S (which may be considered as the number of elements of the set, if the set is finite). The formula expresses the fact that the sum of the sizes of the two sets may be too large since some elements may be counted twice. The double-counted elements are those in the intersection of the two sets and the count is corrected by subtracting the size of the intersection.
The principle is more clearly seen in the case of three sets, which for the sets A, B and C is given by
{\displaystyle |A\cup B\cup C|=|A|+|B|+|C|-|A\cap B|-|A\cap C|-|B\cap C|+|A\cap B\cap C|.}
This formula can be verified by counting how many times each region in the Venn  diagram figure is included in the right-hand side of the formula. In this case, when removing the contributions of over-counted elements, the number of elements in the mutual intersection of the three sets has been subtracted too often, so must be added back in to get the correct total