Transportation Statistics and Microsimulation

Bayesian Approaches to Transportation Data Analysis    ◾    277

is means that a closed-form formula for the posterior distribution does

not need to be obtained. e posterior summaries are computed based on

those samples. Interested readers are referred to the references given in the

previous section.

14.3.2 Point Estimation

A Bayesian approach may utilize various summaries of the posterior

distribution for estimation of the parameter. e mean of the posterior

distribution (posterior mean) is oen used as the Bayes estimator of the

parameter. e denition of the posterior mean is given by

Ex xdθθπθ θ

(

)

=

(

)

∫

.

(14.13)

For the conjugate distributions ...