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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:
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 ...
The posterior probability of a model depends on the evidence, or marginal likelihood, which reflects the probability that the data is generated by the model, and on the prior belief of the model. When two competing models are a priori considered to be equiprobable, the ratio of their posterior probabilities corresponds to the Bayes factor .
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 prior probability may also quantify prior knowledge or information about . P ( B ∣ A ) {\displaystyle P(B\mid A)} is the likelihood function , which can be interpreted as the probability of the evidence B {\displaystyle B} given that A {\displaystyle A} is true.
where (|) denotes the posterior, (|) the likelihood, () the prior, and () the evidence (also referred to as the marginal likelihood or the prior predictive probability of the data). Note that the denominator p ( D ) {\displaystyle p(D)} is normalizing the total probability of the posterior density p ( θ | D ) {\displaystyle p(\theta |D)} to ...
Posterior = Likelihood × Prior ÷ Evidence: Background; Bayesian inference; Bayesian probability; Bayes' theorem; Bernstein–von Mises theorem; Coherence; Cox's theorem; Cromwell's rule; Likelihood principle; Principle of indifference; Principle of maximum entropy; Model building; Conjugate prior; Linear regression; Empirical Bayes ...
A conjugate prior is defined as a prior distribution belonging to some parametric family, for which the resulting posterior distribution also belongs to the same family. This is an important property, since the Bayes estimator, as well as its statistical properties (variance, confidence interval, etc.), can all be derived from the posterior ...