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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 ...
Empirical Bayes methods are procedures for statistical inference in which the prior probability distribution is estimated from the data. This approach stands in contrast to standard Bayesian methods , for which the prior distribution is fixed before any data are observed.
Bayes' theorem describes the conditional probability of an event based on data as well as prior information or beliefs about the event or conditions related to the event. [ 3 ] [ 4 ] For example, in Bayesian inference , Bayes' theorem can be used to estimate the parameters of a probability distribution or statistical model .
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 ().
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.
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
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
The sub-models combine to form the hierarchical model, and Bayes' theorem is used to integrate them with the observed data and account for all the uncertainty that is present. The result of this integration is the posterior distribution, also known as the updated probability estimate, as additional evidence on the prior distribution is acquired.