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An informative prior expresses specific, definite information about a variable. An example is a prior distribution for the temperature at noon tomorrow. A reasonable approach is to make the prior a normal distribution with expected value equal to today's noontime temperature, with variance equal to the day-to-day variance of atmospheric temperature, or a distribution of the temperature for ...
Bayes' theorem applied to an event space generated by continuous random variables X and Y with known probability distributions. There exists an instance of Bayes' theorem for each point in the domain. In practice, these instances might be parametrized by writing the specified probability densities as a function of x and y.
Bayesian inference (/ ˈ b eɪ z i ə n / BAY-zee-ən or / ˈ b eɪ ʒ ən / BAY-zhən) [1] is a method of statistical inference in which Bayes' theorem is used to calculate a probability of a hypothesis, given prior evidence, and update it as more information becomes available.
The probability to measure the state correctly is (and conversely, the probability of an incorrect measurement is ). Due to the conditional dependencies between states at different time points, calculation of the likelihood of time series data is somewhat tedious, which illustrates the motivation to use ABC.
In Bayesian probability theory, if, given a likelihood function (), the posterior distribution is in the same probability distribution family as the prior probability distribution (), the prior and posterior are then called conjugate distributions with respect to that likelihood function and the prior is called a conjugate prior for the likelihood function ().
The use of an improper prior means that the Bayes risk is undefined (since the prior is not a probability distribution and we cannot take an expectation under it). As a consequence, it is no longer meaningful to speak of a Bayes estimator that minimizes the Bayes risk. Nevertheless, in many cases, one can define the posterior distribution
The posterior probability distribution of one random variable given the value of another can be calculated with Bayes' theorem by multiplying the prior probability distribution by the likelihood function, and then dividing by the normalizing constant, as follows:
Given a vector of parameters to determine, a prior probability () over those parameters and a likelihood (,) for making observation , given parameter values and an experiment design , the posterior probability can be calculated using Bayes' theorem