Who cares about coin flips? Well, virtually no one. However, (a) coin flips are a great simple application to get the hang of Bayesian analysis; (b) the kinds of problems that a beta prior and a binomial likelihood function solve go way beyond assessing the fairness of coin flips. We are now going to apply the same technique to a real life problem that I actually came across in my work.
For my job, I had to create a career recommendation system that asked the user a few questions about their preferences and spat out some careers they may be interested in. After a few hours, I had a working prototype. In order to justify putting more resources into improving the project, I had to prove that I was on to something ...
