Machine Learning for OpenCV 4 - Second Edition

Understanding Bayesian inference

Although Bayesian classifiers are relatively simple to implement, the theory behind them can be quite counter-intuitive at first, especially if you are not too familiar with probability theory yet. However, the beauty of Bayesian classifiers is that they understand the underlying data better than all of the classifiers we have encountered so far. For example, standard classifiers, such as the k-nearest neighbor algorithm or decision trees, might be able to tell us the target label of a never-before-seen data point. However, these algorithms have no concept of how likely it is for their predictions to be right or wrong. We call them discriminative models. Bayesian models, on the other hand, have an understanding ...