Bayesian Statistics the Fun Way

9BAYESIAN PRIORS AND WORKING WITH PROBABILITY DISTRIBUTIONS

Prior probabilities are the most controversial aspect of Bayes’ theorem, because they’re frequently considered subjective. In practice, however, they often demonstrate how to apply vital background information to fully reason about an uncertain situation.

In this chapter, we’ll look at how to use a prior to solve a problem, and at ways to use probability distributions to numerically describe our beliefs as a range of possible values rather than single values. Using probability distributions instead of single values is useful for two major reasons.

First, in reality there is often a wide ...