Predicting the Unknown: The History and Future of Data Science and Artificial Intelligence

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to APress Media, LLC, part of Springer Nature 2023

S. KampakisPredicting the Unknownhttps://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4842-9505-2_5

5. What’s Math Got To Do With It? The Power of Probability Distributions

Stylianos Kampakis¹  

(1)

London, UK

 

“Probability theory is nothing but common sense reduced to calculation.”

—Pierre-Simon Laplace

A “probability distribution” is one of the most significant concepts ever devised in mathematics. In an uncertain context, we can’t predict the outcome 100 percent of the time. If we’re trying to predict the next roll of a die, or the outcome of a sports game, we will get it right sometimes, but not all the time. What if we had a way to express the probabilities of the different outcomes? ...